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Jewry in Music” Jewish Entry to the Musical Professions 1780-1850

David Conway, M.A.

Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies University College London

Supervisor: Prof. John Klier

Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) at the University of London

June 2007 UMI Number: U591449

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ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Summary of Thesis

In 1800 hardly any were involved in 'musique savante'. Within 50 years in Western they were to be found in active roles in almost every aspect of the music economy, as performers, , publishers, critics and instrument-makers.

Whilst this phenomenon has been widely noted, it presently lacks an academic analysis. The dissertation sets the entry of Jews to the musical professions in a number of contexts; the political, social and economic circumstances of European states; and ‘transferable skills’; ‘emancipation’ of European Jews and their entry to wider society; reforms in the Jewish religion and liturgy; the Romantic and nationalists movements of the era; the growth of a music ‘industry’ and the consequences of developments in technology, changing audiences and patrons, and the emergence of a ‘’ canon.

Beginning with a survey of the principal issues to be discussed and a summary of the status of Jews in music in the early and mid-eighteenth centuries, the dissertation examines the emergence of Jewish musical involvement in five European societies - the , , , and - and notes the underlying factors, some of which were common to all, some of which were country-specific. Within these surveys extended treatment is given to significant figures - not only the famous such as , but also the less well-known such as Alkan and Nathan. Consideration is given not only to the activities of Jews in music, but to the ‘reception’ of these activities by their contemporaries, and to the broader social implications of these activities.

The dissertation concludes with a review of the status and achievements of Jews in music in Western Europe on the eve of the publication of Richard 's essay Das Judentum in der Musik' in 1850.

2 “// n'y a que trois ‘B ' dans la musique - Bach, Beethoven et

Brahms - les autres sont cretins. "

- attributed to the and conductor Hans von Biilow (1 830-1894)

‘7/ n'y a que trois ‘M’ dans la musique - Mendelssohn,

Meyerbeer et Moszkowski - les autres sont chretiens. "

- attributed to the pianist and Maurice Moszkowski (1 854-1925)'

1 See van Dieren (1935) 8.

3 Contents I. Scope, Intention and Structure of this Study 1.1 ‘Whatever the reasons’ 6 1.2 Processes of Change: A Very Brief Review 19 1.3 Judentum 23 1.4 Structure 27 II. ‘Eppes Rores’ - Can a be an Artist? Introduction 29 II. 1 Jewish Musical Life in Europe Before the Period of Emancipation 31 11.2 Transferable Skills 45 11.3 Can a Jew Have Taste? 47 11.4 Civic Status and the Quest for Culture 57 11.5 Words and Music - Da Ponte and Heine 69 III. In the Midst of Many People 111.1 Musical Europe 73 111.2 The Netherlands 111.2.1 Early Immigration 78 111.2.2 The Sephardi Magnates 80 111.2.3 Economic Decline of the Netherlands and Advent of the 82 Ashkenazim 111.3 England 111.3.1 Re-entry of Jews to England 85 111.3.2 Overview: English Musical Life in the Eighteenth 86 Century 111.3.3 Handel and the Jews 88 111.3.4 Jewish Musicians in Eighteenth Century London 90 111.3.5 Myer Lion alias Leoni 99 111.3.6 111.3.6.1 His Putative Origin and Musical Siblings 103 111.3.6.2 His Early Career 108 111.3.6.3 ‘Family Quarrels’ 112 111.3.6.4 Braham as a 117 111.3.7 and the ‘Hebrew ’ 121 111.3.8 in Musical Life, 1825-1850 135 111.3.9 German Jews in British Music 140 111.3.10 The West End 151 111.4 Austria Introduction 155 111.4.1 ’s ‘Second Society’, 1780-1815 157 111.4.2 Jewish Musicians in Beethoven’s Vienna 164 111.4.3 Beethoven’s Circle 170 111.4.4 Salomon Sulzer 173 111.4.5 Rosenthal and Gusikov - Jewish Musician as Patriot and 177 Patriarch 111.5 Germany Introduction 185

4 111.5.1 : The Itzig Family and its Circle 187 111.5.2 Berlin’s Jews 1780-1815: the Salons and After 191 111.5.3 Music in the Reformed Congregations, and in the 200 ‘Counter-Reformation’ 111.5.4 Meyerbeer’s Musical Apprenticeship 205 111.5.5 The Education of Felix and 212 111.5.6 Jewish Activists in German Music 218 III.5.9 Schumann and Wagner on Jews 236 III.6 France Introduction 245 111.6.1 as a Centre 111.6.1.1 The Jews of Paris 248 111.6.1.2 The Consistorial and its Music 251 111.6.1.3 Musical Theatre in Paris in the 1820s 253 111.6.1.4 The Conservatoire 254 111.6.2 Fromental Halevy 111.6.2.1 Progress of an Israelite 256 111.6.2.2 ‘’ 263 111.6.2.3 Halevy and the Jewish Community 266 111.6.3 Alkan 111.6.3.1 The Early Years 273 111.6.3.2 The Years of Fame (1830-1850) and After 278 111.6.4 German Jews in Musical Paris 285 111.6.5 Meyerbeer and the Triumph of Grand 111.6.5.1 Meyerbeer in 296 111.6.5.2 The Supremacy of Meyerbeer 301 IV Jewry in Music 311 — 000— Appendix I: Jews, Music and 321 Appendix II: Individual approaches to : Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn, Alkan 1. Meyerbeer: Devotion and Confidence 328 2. The Jewish Ambience of 335 3. Alkan: ‘I sleep but my heart waketh’ 345 — 000— Afternote 353 — 000— Bibliography 354 — 000— Annex I: Partial Family Trees of the Beers, Itzigs and Mendelssohns 377 Annex II: Timelines 387

5 Jewry in Music I. Preface: Scope, Intention and Structure

I. Scope, Intention and Structure of this Study

1. ‘Whatever the reasons’

‘Whatever the reasons’ writes Leon Poliakov incuriously, ‘in the realms of the fine arts, it was primarily as musicians that the emancipated Jews excelled’.2

But exactly why did Jews suddenly become apparent within the music profession from the turn of the nineteenth century onwards? Why moreover did they meet, within the century, with such success as to hold notable positions within almost all branches of the profession - and in associated areas including management, publishing and patronage?

In casual conversation on these questions, the writer has often been met with a reaction of surprise, or even exasperation, by both Jewish and Gentile interlocutors, on the grounds that such progress was only to be expected from a people (‘race’ of course remains the unspoken word) with natural musical talent. But the conventional wisdom that Jews are especially musically gifted seems to have emerged fully-formed during the nineteenth century - it certainly did not exist, even amongst the Jews themselves, before that. Rather the contrary.

True, the Jewish ‘name’ most familiar today in this context, Felix Mendelssohn, was brought up a practising Christian; but a roll call of the early nineteenth century would include many musicians or musical pundits of the first rank, bom Jews, who remained Jewish or seem to have converted for convenience - amongst them, for example, the composers Meyerbeer, Halevy, Offenbach; the violinists Joachim and David; the virtuosi Moscheles, Alkan, Herz and Rubinstein; writers on music such as Saphir, Heine and - all of them commanding figures in their time, and having a significant effect in their own right, both individually and cumulatively, on the development of Western music. In the middle of the nineteenth century Jews represented less than one per cent of the population of Western Europe; it can therefore be reasonably asserted that, at the very least, they were punching above their weight in the field of music.

2 Poliakov (1975)440.

6 Jewry in Music I. Preface: Scope, Intention and Structure

Writers touching on the topic have been for the most part as blase as Poliakov. The articles in Grove on are extensive on music within Jewish communities, both religious and secular, but have nothing to say on music made by Jews in the wider social context.3 Academic histories of the Jews are opaque on the topic. Thus Sachar, covering the period from the eighteenth century to the present, ignores Jewish musicians before Mahler and blandly comments:

Most Jewish composers, writers and scientists moved with , keeping up with new ideas and theories, but rarely demonstrating a personal willingness to pioneer themselves.4

This interestingly hints, doubtless unwittingly, at the jibe that Jews are culturally better fitted to be critics, imitators or analysts rather than creators; a concept which has typically underlain much anti-Jewish writing on music.

Those who look more closely at developments in particular countries in general do no better. For France, Michael Graetz gives only the briefest of passing references to Meyerbeer and Fromental Halevy, who between them laid the foundations for the supremacy of Parisian .5 Amos Elon’s ‘portrait of the Jews in Germany’, The Pity o f it All, has a paragraph on Felix Mendelssohn and no mention at all of Meyerbeer (who became, after all, Court composer to the Prussian King). Mahler gets a one-sentence quote about his distaste for Polish Jews.6 The reader would have no inkling from this of the intense involvement of German Jews in the concert and opera life of the country. Adler’s brief study of the musical life of the Jewish community has much information but, by its nature, offers little background social context.7

Works dealing with Jewish economic history concentrate for obvious reasons on the contributions of Jews to industry and commerce. Thus, except for passing references to printing, the Jewish role in the arts is ignored by handbooks such as the

4 Sec e.g. GOL, Jew ish music. 4 Sachar (1990) 475. 4 Graetz (1996). Kspagne (1996) does, however, provide a whole chapter on musical Jews in Paris. 6 Klon (2003). Similarly Sorkin (1999) has a chapter on 'Secular Culture’ (140-155), but devotes it almost entirely to the writer Auaerbach, without any mention of Jewish musicians. 7 Adler (1974).

7 Jewry in Music I. Preface: Scope, Intention and Structure

compendium derived from the ' and M osse’s Jews in the German Economy.9

In virtually all of these studies is treated as a gravitational force which attracted to it a few Jews of appropriate genius; thus conforming to what Cooperman has called ‘the once-accepted view that placed political emancipation, social integration and cultural westernization at the teleological center of ’.10 The scenario of Jews becoming ‘serious’ musicians fits ill with the paradigm, well summarized by a chapter heading of Katz’s Out of the Ghetto, ‘The Futile Flight from Jewish Professions’.11 Conventional wisdom in Jewish social history has been to accept that the role of Jews in wider society after the opening of the ghettos in the was in fact limited, despite their theoretical freedom to diversify. Katz writes, in explanation of the invisible barriers that continued to exist:

[I]t was assumed that entry into European society would result in [Jews] shedding all Jewish peculiarities and possibly lead to complete absorption o f the Jews by their environment. This was far from being the case.12

Hence Jews were in fact constrained to continue their ‘traditional’ callings in commerce and Finance. Perhaps in this light Jewish musicians are the exception that proves the rule: in the less formally constrained world of the arts, maybe their peculiarities were not so outstanding (or even an asset for their novelty). Katz does make a brave attempt at considering Jewish musicians in his essay on Wagner, but his absence of consideration of any but the central figures of Wagner, Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer significantly limits the headway he might have made.13

Not even in works specifically dedicated to the history of Jewish music can we find any causal analysis of the dramatic flowering of Jews in nineteenth-century music,

x Baron and others (1975). 4 W. Mosse (1987). 10 Katz (1993), 242. 11 In Kat/ (1998). ch. XI. 12 Ibid 190. 13 Katz (1986).

8 Jewry in Music I. Preface: Scope, Intention and Structure

beyond the standard ‘out of the ghetto’ gambit. Gradenwitz jumps from seventeenth- century Italy to a chapter entitled ‘From Mendelssohn to Mahler’ and notes that

There is a conspicuous hiatus between the period of [...] Salomone Rossi Ebreo, and the composer who opens the next chapter of our survey [...] Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. Considering the fact that Jewish artists have so often played important roles in periods of transition, it is somewhat puzzling that they had no part in the great stylistic changes that occurred in eighteenth century music [... ]14

Setting aside Gradenwitz’s debatable ‘fact’, it should be said that he then accurately identifies a major reason for the absence, until the end of the eighteenth century, of Jewish musical participation - inability to access the patronage of the church or the aristocracy. Whilst regretting that ‘none of the great Jewish nineteenth century composers created works that had a decisive bearing on the history of Hebrew music’ he also provides the useful and largely appropriate formulation ‘this is no longer the story of Jewish music but the story of music by Jewish masters’.15

This divergence between sacred music and ‘concert’ music, and their continuing occasional relationship thereafter, is indeed an important aspect of the survey offered by the present study. Gradenwitz’s aper$u also teases out two other important threads: first, it signals as a topic for investigation the extent to which the careers of these Jewish masters may have been affected by their origins, and secondly, it stresses that these were masters whose music deserves to be considered in its own right in terms of European cultural history, not merely as an accessory to narratives of Jewish/European social relations.

When we consider the literature pertaining to Wagnerian Jew-hatred, we find that the advance of political, and in particular Holocaust-orientated, Jewish history further muddies the waters. Magee for example is strong on philosophy and ideas, yet (self- confessedly) has no understanding of Jewish history or culture.16 Rose, whose work is

14 Gradenwitz (1996) 172. 15 Ibid. 175, 174. 16 See his books on Wagner, Magee (1988) and Magee (2000). In his autobiography, Magee writes: ‘Of all the religions I studied, the one I found least worthy of intellectual respect was Judaism’: Magee (1998) 444.

9 Jewry in Music I. Preface: Scope, Intention and Structure

regarded by some as a major landmark in both Wagner and Jewish studies, is strident in his denunciation of the development of anti-Jewish opinions and ideas in early nineteenth-century Germany, but not always coherent (or accurate) in linking these to Wagner, whilst displaying little interest in, or understanding of, German Jews themselves.17

Moreover, neither writer (any more than the already-mentioned Katz) shows any comprehension of the ‘social’ world of music during the period; what musicians, including Wagner, Jews and all others - were actually doing. The anti-Judaism of Wagner (and of or others) was not just an abstract attitude with an independent intellectual life of its own unconnected to the world of events - it had its roots in, and was connected to, both Jews and music, and not only to the personalities of Wagner and Schumann, or to German developments in philosophy and politics. The first two elements - Jews and music - need to be understood and discussed as well as the others.

Amongst music historians there often seems some surprising residual reticence on the topic of Jewishness; it has proved possible recently to publish a biography of the harpist Elias Parish-Alvars, without mentioning (or even attempting to deny) that he was a Jew.18 More recently, the aftermath of the Werner affair19 has perhaps made some scholars overly discreet on such matters - for example, R. Larry Todd’s substantial Mendelssohn biography nowhere mentions the Jewish origins of the many members of the composer’s close circle, with the exception of a passing reference to the conversion of Heine.20

A survey of the existing literature therefore suggests a general conclusion that the absence of any formal historical consideration of the entry of Jews to the music professions at this period is due to the unease of (1) social and political historians unfamiliar with the history of music and/or that of the Jews, (2) music historians

17 Rose (1992). 18 Sacchi (1999). 14 The scholar Kric Werner proved to be over-enthusiastic, and in some cases possibly fraudulent, in attributing pro-Jewish sentiments to Felix Mendelssohn. See Sposato (1998), Botstein (1998) and (1999), Steinberg (1999) and Ward Jones (1999). Relevant elements of this dispute are discussed in Appendix II. 2. 20 Todd (2003).

10 Jewry in Music I. Preface: Scope, Intention and Structure

uncomfortable with the social and political background and/or uninformed on Jewish background, and (3) Jewish historians unequipped with musical and/or socio- historical insight.

The questions involved clearly require some broader considerations, that have not been undertaken to date, of events and ideas. The object of the present study is therefore to investigate to what extent the appearance of Jews in modern Western European music was a consequence of, or was affected by, a series of processes of social, political, economic and technical change in the period; to consider to what extent these various factors interacted with the ‘Jewishness’ (in any sense) of the newcomers; and to survey how this appearance was received or interpreted by other Jews and interested .

It will be demonstrated that music itself became a means of ‘social entryism’ for Jews. It is no new perception that success in the field of entertainment offers opportunities for outsiders to obtain status in society. This is simply verifiable by observation today, where sport and remain powerful career aspirations amongst immigrant communities in all Western societies. In these fields what is basically required - apart from the necessity of good luck - is at least some modicum of talent or ability, preferably coupled with some charisma; personal attractiveness is also a valuable supplement. The very quality of being an outsider may be an advantage in securing public attention. The results of success can include fame and fortune (often only temporary), and an opportunity, sometimes achieved, of establishing a permanent position of respect in the host society either by means of professional pre-eminence, wealth, marriage or a combination of these. Examples of such narratives amongst Jews of the period form part of the content of this study.

The starting date of 1780 is not rigidly adhered to, but is symbolically appropriate, beginning the decade which saw the Austrian Joseph II’s ‘Edict of Tolerance'. As Jews and Jewish communities emerged from the restraints placed on them by Church and state during the mediaeval period, they naturally began to appear in a number of previously unfamiliar roles, including in the musical professions. It is of course misleading to think of the process of this ‘emancipation’ as simultaneous or uniform; it varied greatly throughout Europe according to local political, social and economic circumstances, and commenced or accelerated at different times in different societies.

11 Jewry in Music I. Preface: Scope, Intention and Structure

Thus in the Netherlands and England it was already to some extent advanced at the start of the eighteenth century, whereas it scarcely commenced in France until the Revolution, save for the tolerated crypto-Sephardim or ‘New ’ of the region. Nor is such ‘emancipation’ necessarily a consequence of legislative process; indeed in France it effectively post-dated the grant of civic equality. Perhaps it is helpful to think rather in terms of the ‘accommodation’ of Jews by (and to) the civil societies in which they lived, as a gradual process. By the there were signs of such accommodation throughout Western Europe, if not everywhere as a reality, at least as an idea.21

Geographically the study concentrates on the musical centres of the period, and those are, in the main, large Western European cities, in particular Amsterdam, London, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin. All of these had (by 1850) large resident Jewish communities.

Of course Italian opera continued to be very active in the country of its birth throughout the period, but the aim of all the artistes and composers connected with it was to establish themselves and their reputations, for sound economic reasons, in the northern European cities. Whilst opera in Italy was respected by both natives and travellers from abroad, the operatic centres, in terms of investment and artistic development, and of remuneration, were elsewhere. Italy therefore receives only minor attention in this study, although Jewish musical involvement there - even though the local Jewish population was small and economically relatively inactive - will be demonstrated.

With very few exceptions (some of whom will be noted), Jews from and had little access to the West and played a very small part in Western European musical life until conditions began to change in the second half of the century. It was also after 1850 that the United States began to play any significant role in musical life and the . This means that my chosen end-date of 1850, which I discuss below, justifies excluding these countries and areas from central consideration.

21 Sec e.g. Katz (1998) 28-41.

12 Jewry in Music I. Preface: Scope, Intention and Structure

For clarification I also set out some of the principal assumptions underlying my presentation.

As regards the supposition of a natural Jewish musical talent, touched on above, it is not my intention to take sides in any debate on the genetics of Jewish intelligence.22 I am sceptical of any Jewish genetic predisposition to music; but whether such a predisposition exists or not is in broad terms irrelevant to the social, economic and technical interactions to be reviewed. Even were some genetic advantage to exist, it would not explain the influence gained by Jews in the world of music, from a standing start, over a seventy-year period.

For similar reasons I devote no attention to pursuing the possible ‘Jewishness’ of any of the music produced by the musicians under discussion, save where this is explicit or can be reasonably inferred, or where it is assumed and used as a basis for further argument (with or without reason) by their critics or commentators. For example, the sixth movement of Beethoven’s op. 131 does indeed commence with a melodic line almost identical to that of the Yom Kippur prayer ‘'\ a key passage in Mendelssohn’s may, possibly, ‘hark back to a mediaeval tune of the German Jews’.23 As a listener, one’s fancy may be tickled: as a historian or musicologist, in the absence of any other relevant evidence linking this music to its conjectured sources, the response can only be indifference. The supposed ‘Hebraic art-taste’ of Meyerbeer, on which Wagner was to expostulate, has defied all attempts to define its precise characterisation, in musicological (or any other) terms. That such resonances, where they are alleged, lie in the perception of those knowing the background of the composers concerned, rather than anything inherent in the music itself, is suggested by the analogous, more recent, debate about the existence, or invention, of ‘gay music’.24 In any event, in this study, the musicological, whilst by no means unconsidered, remains subsidiary to the socio-historical.

It is necessary of course to comment on the word ‘Jewish’. I do not limit the notion of being Jewish to those who practise the Jewish religion, or to those who are

" As exemplified for example on the one hand by Patai (1977) and the other by Gilman (1996). Werner (1963)471. 24 See e.g. Tommasini (2004).

13 Jewry in Music I. Preface: Scope, Intention and Structure

halachically Jewish. Jewish parentage is of course a near-essential criterion: but if a person feels themselves to be, or is felt by others to be, Jewish, and their behaviour, or that of others towards them, is affected thereby, then they are potentially grist to the mill of this study. Thus, it could be argued, it would not be inappropriate to include in this survey even the ‘one-eighth-Jew’ who wrote about his wife the following comment:

Without thinking I uttered a phrase (kommt mir das Jiideln in den Mund) and then - she stops being a Jewess: you can have no idea how offended she felt in that instant - she would have scratched my eyes out for my lovely Jiideln.25

On the other hand the facetious comment of Brahms in a letter to Joachim - ‘How goes it with the glorification of the race from which I sprang?’26 - would scarcely qualify him.

Being ‘Jewish’ for the purposes of this dissertation is therefore not necessarily a matter of religious belief or observance. There are many other criteria which can result in a person being considered Jewish - whether they wish it or not. Let us for example consider the case of Felix Mendelssohn, a professing Lutheran, brought up without any participation in Jewish religious practice.

There are physical factors - ’s very first comment in her journal on meeting Mendelssohn is ‘He is short, dark and Jewish-looking’.27

There is the collection of Jewish social attitudes - humour, phrases, customs, behaviour - called by Jews themselves ‘yiddishkeit' - and frequently displaying a persistence. Thus we shall see Mendelssohn, in a letter to his family from London in

25 Johann Strauss II (1825-1899) to his brother-in-law Josef Simon, quoted in Dachs (1999) 150 (*). Strauss, who was brought up in the Jewish quarter of Vienna, often referred to his wife using the Yiddish word 'Weibleben'. Johann's grandfather Johnann Michael was recorded at his marriage as a’baptised Jew.’ (Kemp (1985) 15). ■f> ‘ Wie geht es mit der Verherrlichung des Volkes, vondem ich abstimme?' Quoted in Chernaik (2004), 12, and apparently a sardonic comment on (completely unfounded) press speculation that his family name was originally ‘Abrahams’. 27 Journal, 16 June 1842. Quoted in Nichols (1997) 139.

14 Jewry in Music I. Preface: Scope, Intention and Structure

1833, using the Yiddish/Hebrew word ‘Rosche’ (Hebrew rasha) to describe a wicked fellow.28

And there is the question of the company one keeps: anyone considering the career of Mendelssohn will undoubtedly observe the great number of German Jews or Neuchristen converts who played significant roles in his musical and social life. Setting aside his direct relatives, we can reel off names such as Moscheles, Benedict, David, Joachim, Hiller, Marx, Meyerbeer, Heine, Robert, d’Eichtal, Fould, and many more, which constantly recur in any Mendelssohn biography.

These and similar pointers all have some part to play in the history to be outlined. Their application to Mendelssohn and his circle is discussed in more detail in Appendix II.2.

Sartre’s concept that a Jew is anyone who is perceived as a Jew lays onus on the perceiver as well as the perceived. There is a need clearly to demarcate the attribution or supposition by writers of the of groups or individuals, from profession or manifestation of Jewish identity by those groups or individuals themselves. As an example, Winter notes in Italy

[...] a whole group of 15th century dancing masters, mostly of Jewish descent [...] Parenthetically, the astonishing number of Jewish dancing masters at the Renaissance courts forms an odd pendant of information to that of the equally astonishing number of Jewish performers among the acrobats, rope-dancers, marionette-showmen and later equestrian artists who travelled the European fairground circuit.29

This has given rise to the suggestion that many of the European dancing and circus families may have been of Jewish origin and that ‘they were prepared to change their names and religion, if necessary, to conform to local municipal strictures’.30 Hard evidence for these claims is not available, and in its absence it is necessary to temper any enthusiasm that Winter’s statement (for which she provides no references or outside support) may arouse. Some writers (both well-meaning and malevolent) are

28 See Appendix II.2 24 Winter (1974) 10. 10 Burnim (1995) 66.

15 Jewry in Music I. Preface: Scope, Intention and Structure

notably more over-sanguine than others in identifying Jews in music, and mere attribution alone, on whatever authority, must be treated with the greatest caution.

A specific example, which has demonstrated some persistence, is the case of Manuel Garcia (1775-1832). This Spanish singer and teacher was enormously successful and influential in his own right, but was also the father of two of the nineteenth century’s leading sopranos, (1808-1836), and (1821-1910). Isaac Nathan, who was an acquaintance of Malibran, wrote in 1836 that ‘Emanuel Garcia [...] was bom at Seville, , and was the son of respectable Hebrew parents’.31 Others have followed this attribution of origin.However, evidence is at best equivocal; neither Garcia himself nor any of his descendants displayed any passive or active association with the Jewish religion or Jewish communities. Grove states ‘Garcia was not his own name, but that of his stepfather; he never knew his father’.32 A leading Spanish music dictionary, on the other hand, states that his surnames at birth were Aguilar Gonzales, and that the reasons for his change of name have not been discovered.33 Both Aguilar and Gonzales are surnames which may be associated with Jews; however, in this case it seems impossible to distinguish whether the mystery of his names gave rise to the that he was Jewish, or whether perhaps it was intended to obscure the fact that he was Jewish. If the latter, that might have been meat for this study; but given the uncertainty, Garcia and his progeny are not discussed further herein as Jews or possible Jews.

In fact, where not clouded by opportunistic attribution, the question of Jewish identity, which was to become a major social issue later in the nineteenth century and beyond, is relatively simple in the period covered by this study. In Europe of the ghettos, Jews were quite simply those who lived in these ghettos, both the physical districts and the self-imposed ghettos of self-differentiation. Jews defined themselves (to the Gentiles) by their dedication to their own religion and community and their unwillingness to change their ways (and may have been specifically differentiated according to the law of the land in some countries). All those of Jewish birth who were active musicians before 1850 were only one generation from one or both of the

?l Nathan (1836) 2. 32 GOL, Garcia I Manuelfdel Popolo Vicente Rodriguez) Garcia. ” DMKH, Garcia III. I Manuel del Populo Vicente.

16 Jewry in Music I. Preface: Scope, Intention and Structure

physical and social ghettoes and the social exclusions associated with them, were perfectly aware of where they had come from, and were under few if any illusions about the uncertainty of their social standing. To make one obvious point, virtually all of the male figures from the period under discussion denoted as Jewish will have been circumcised, a practice almost exclusively limited in Western Europe at the time to Jews. This was a circumstance of which they can scarcely have been unaware, and of which they must indeed have been daily reminded, whether they attended Church or synagogue.

It is perhaps the ‘purist’ view of some writers that has militated against the study of many of these figures in a Jewish context. ‘Does the fact of Jewish parentage fasten one’s creativity to Judaism, despite a lifetime of Christian affiliation?’ asks Heskes. ‘If so, the following can be considered Jewish composers’ and she lists, with some evident disdain, Mendelssohn, Moscheles, Goldmark, Rubinstein and others. ‘Is it the paucity of numbers rather than the specific ethnic inspiration that prompts some Jewish writers to include these composers among their Judaic listings?’34 The criterion of ‘ethnic inspiration’, ironically so closely allied to the notions of the detractors of Jewish music and musicality (and of Jews in general) - such as Wagner’s ‘hebraisches Kunstgeschmack' - will not be utilised in the present study. Nor do I feel constrained to accept Heskes’s implicit concept that Jewish origins cannot affect any creative actions (or actions bearing on creative lives) that are not explicitly ‘fastened’ to Judaism, and I shall provide counter-examples from amongst those listed by her.

At the other extreme I am concerned not to risk the type of historical writing characterized by Wasserstein as ‘antiquarianism without internal coherence, broader significance or intellectual substance - the sort of Jewish history that searches for the first Jew in Tunbridge Wells or the of this or that public figure’.35 This risk will be small so long as those aspects of music are kept in view in which Jews are seen to have made a notable contribution; and so long as there is a focus on the part their Jewishness may have played in their entry, prominence or reception. Amongst such aspects, discussed in the study, are the tradition of the virtuoso, the rise

-4 Heskes (1994) 269. 45 Wasserstein (2002) 11.

17 Jewry in Music I. Preface: Scope, Intention and Structure

of grand opera, the establishment of the canon of ‘classical music’, and the development of musical journalism, all of which have left their mark on the practice and culture of serious music of the present day.

All of the musicians listed by Heskes, and very many that are not, at some point or other in their lives found their Jewishness impinging on their careers, and all of them would have been able to echo the words of the writer and convert Ludwig Borne (born Juda Loew Baruch) written in 1832:

Some people criticize me for being a Jew; others forgive me for being one; a third even praises me for it; but all are thinking about it.36

That is the ethos, not today entirely extinct, in which Jewish musicians operated in the period 1780-1850 and which coloured both their successes and their failures.

Further, the history of the involvement of Jews in music has something to say about the broader dynamics of Western society; the relationship of Jews to ‘music’ tells us about the relationship of Jews to a society in which ‘music’ was an important - or at least a high-profile - activity. The story of the rise, golden age and afterlife of Jewry in Music over the past two hundred years is parallel to, and can illuminate, the story of western Jewry as a whole.

36 ‘Letter from Paris’ no. 74, quoted in in Gilman (1997) 130.

18 Jewry in Music I. Preface: Scope, Intention and Structure

2. Processes of Change: A Very Brief Review

There is no shortage of material about the profound changes, in all spheres, in Europe in the decades either side of the . This study will concentrate on how these changes manifested themselves in its twin topic areas, Jewry and music, and how the consequences of these changes within these historical ‘sub-sets’ impinged on each other in a variety of ways. These sub-sets of course need to be considered in the context of the larger geopolitical/religious process summarised by Burleigh:

The nineteenth century commenced with the near-universality of the confessional state under which one religion, or Christian denomination, was privileged by the state, while other denominations and religions were tolerated at best. By the century’s close, these arrangements had been abandoned, or modified, almost beyond recognition.37

The different way in which these changes took place in each country will be seen to affect the local involvement of Jews in music.

Alongside the studies on social, political and economic revolutions of the period, much has now been published on the emergence of Jewry in Western European society at this period, fuelled by these same agents of change, but also driven by developments within Jewry itself that had been gathering pace over the previous two hundred years;38 the milestones in the period of this study include the bridgehead between Jewish and secular European thought established by Mendelssohn, the edicts of toleration issued by ‘enlightened despots’ in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the reforms of the Napoleonic period, the end of the ghetto system in Western Europe as a consequence of the Napoleonic Wars and the uneasy and uneven progress of Jewish social integration following the restoration of the old regimes.

These were mapped and mirrored by changes and controversies within the Jewish communities, emerging from the constraints of the ghetto to the new opportunities and new problems of a wider society. As the individual Jew needed to alter his culture

37 Burleigh (2005) 311. 38 See for example Katz (1993) for an account in this .

19 Jewry in Music I. Preface: Scope, Intention and Structure

and behaviour to make his way in wider society, so did Jewish communities as a whole. The social organisation of the Jewish communities, the practices of their , the very religion itself (for the first time in many centuries) began to shift to adapt themselves to their host societies. In turn these changes generated musical consequences both within and outside Judaism.

It is appropriate to enlarge a little on the world of music at this time, where the processes of change were no less far-reaching than in other spheres. Remarkably, no large-scale historical review of these changes, examining both their individual and cumulative effects, has been undertaken to date, although there are numerous excellent thematic studies, some of which will be referred to herein. Musical history has tended, until recent years, to concentrate on music itself and its creators and interpreters, and to a significantly lesser extent on its technology, rather than its economics and sociology. The focus of the present study prevents a full-scale analysis of these latter topics, intrinsic though they are to its discussion. The following thumbnail review is therefore designed to give an indication of the scope of the changes involved, some of which will be treated in more detail as appropriate in the body of this study.39

Some changes were technical or structural; for example, the development of the iron­ framed piano and the innovation of the Tourte violin bow and introduction of wound (wire) strings, which enabled powerful instruments that could project in a large concert-hall, and withstand heavy treatment, paving the way for new concepts of virtuosity, and new types and forms (and lengths) of music; new theatre technologies which made possible the spectacle and sensation of grand opera; developments in music publication, printing and copyright procedures; the appearance of training institutions, notably the Paris Conservatoire, which for the first time allowed access to musical skills on the basis of talent alone. Moreover these institutes began to establish a new and objective basis for professional musical qualification, replacing the old systems of patronage.

An engaging and original review of the evolution of the musical economy at this period is to be found in Scherer (2004).

20 Jewry in Music I. Preface: Scope, Intention and Structure

Other changes were social, such as the decline or recession of aristocratic, and Church funding of music (and indeed the need to replace this funding, as ‘art’ music became increasingly separated from popular music). In this social category could also be placed the significant change in the socio-geography of popular music, which no longer started in the country and was taken up in town, but was generated increasingly in the music- and dance-halls of the growing towns and filtered down to the rural populace. This will have assisted the swift diffusion of musical fashion. Also important here is the advent of the modem concept of audience and its relation to social classes (the toffs in the boxes, the plebs in the gallery), and their different tastes.

Also significant are the ‘business’ and economic changes in music: the appearance of a new body and pattern of demand from the bourgeois audience as consumer; the development to meet this demand of commercial opera-houses, concert halls, and permanent , requiring new classes of professional musician (including the profession of orchestral conductor); the continuing ‘globalisation’ of an industry which had already produced European ‘superstars’ throughout the eighteenth century; the fashion for all genteel families to own a piano and to sing, which not only promoted instrument manufacture but supported a vast market for sheet-music; the evolution of a consensus repertoire, labelled ‘classical’ to give it equivalent status to the classical art, sculpture, literature and architecture of the civilizations of and Rome (whose music of course no longer existed).40 Relevant to this acceleration of the music economy was the growth of railways in Western Europe during the second quarter of the nineteenth century which accentuated the leading musical roles of the great capitals in their circuits.

Accompanying the structural changes in the technology, practice and business of music were changes in musical ideology and philosophy. The German school of aesthetics in particular posited new views of the role of art and the artist in society. Music, which had once played a subsidiary role in court politics of the eighteenth century, could elicit powerful social partisanship in the nineteenth, as both Wagner

40 The earliest recorded application of the word ‘classical’ to music in the present-day usage, according to the English Dictionary, is in 1836. See also Appendix 1.2.

21 Jewry in Music I. Preface: Scope, Intention and Structure

and Verdi were to demonstrate, in different ways. Romanticism recreated the musician as ‘artist’, and could incarnate him further as ‘hero’. Nationalism in music could indeed become a political issue. Taste could become the expression of desire for enjoyment and spectacle, rather than an obligation to acknowledge the standards of a social hierarchy; and the critic, emerging as a professional, rather than the informed amateur of the eighteenth century, could expand his area of commentary from the dry tracking of parallel fifths and other technical solecisms to the broader fields of political, economic and metaphysical speculation. Instrumental music could be appreciated independently from a vocal line, and could even be asserted as a superior art-form:41 whilst stars of the opera continued to reap glory and riches, the instrumental virtuosos, especially those who played on the piano or violin, formed a new breed of superstars. Composers, who in the eighteenth century had typically been court lackeys, could now, like Beethoven, find dukes and princes begging for the privilege of their compositions, or, like Rossini and subsequently Meyerbeer, find themselves dictators of the musical tastes of the Continent.

This was a system in such a state of flux that it allowed many points of entry to those willing and able to exploit them.

41 See e.g. K. T. A. Hoffmann’s highly influential essay ‘Beethovens lntrumentalmusik' (1813). (translation in Hermand (1994) 59-64).

22 Jewry in Music I. Preface: Scope, Intention and Structure

3. Judentum

These parallel states of flux in music and in society enabled Jews to approach these new opportunities in music in ways which were to some extent determined by their own experience and traditions. These did indeed differentiate some of the aims and perspectives of Jewish musicians from those of their gentile colleagues. These perspectives may be associated to some extent with the traditions of Jewish music, but are also related to the Jewish intellectual and commercial traditions; to the customs and ethos of the ghetto; and to the nature and experience of the relationship between Jew and Gentile of the previous centuries. This study will identify how the progress of involvement varied according to social and political contexts, concentrating, as already explained, mainly on Western Europe.

Musical Jews should not be considered as a homogenous group; rich Jews approached music differently from poor Jews, German Jews approached it differently from French Jews. Many studies have been made of the progress of and assimilation in European societies and offering models of these processes; comments will be made on how the progress of Jewish musicians conformed to or differed from these. These will be illustrated through the experiences of the Jews involved, confessing, lapsed and renegade, famous and forgotten, successes and failures; and, just as significantly, through the perceptions held of these Jews by their Christian contemporaries.

Virtually the only element of these issues to have received academic attention to date is the involuntary role of Jewish composers and their music in the development of secular anti-Jewish ideology. The prime cause of this phenomenon is clear; it is W agner’s essay Das Judentum in der Musik,42 originally published under a pseudonym in a music magazine in 1850 and reissued under Wagner’s name in a greatly expanded version some twenty years later. Over the past twenty-five years - but not before - a substantial literature has been devoted to this essay, perhaps largely in response to the growth, over a similar period, of the academic discipline of ‘Holocaust Studies’. Das Judentum is not mentioned at all, for example, in Arendt’s

42 In the spelling of the time, used by Wagner, the word is 4 Judentlium' but I use the present-day spelling throughout for convenience.

23 Jewry in Music I. Preface: Scope, Intention and Structure

Antisemitism, which first appeared in 1951.43 Most of this recent literature involves the alleged political ‘after-effects’ of the essay and its significance as a milestone, or even its status as a ‘missing link’, in a line of philosophical and political anti-Jewish ideas from Kant and Fichte to Hitlerism.44 A smaller corpus investigates the nature of Jewish cultural involvement in European society in the light of what may be construed as valid insights on Wagner’s part (that is, valid despite his acknowledgedly unacceptable anti-Jewish effusions).45 Even this latter material only examines in passing Wagner’s diatribe in the wider context of the music of its own time.

Many of Wagner’s perceptions about Jewish involvement in music were striking, although his analysis and presentation were as wrong-headed in his own day as they are rebarbative, for different reasons (i.e. memory of the Shoah), today. This study will show that, by 1850, those trends in musical fashion to which Wagner was opposed, together with significant elements of the business apparatus of the music industry of the time, were indeed influenced, directly and indirectly, by many who were of Jewish origin; but the explanations for this are rooted, not of course in racial conspiracy, but in the complex interweaving of factors over the previous decades which I hope to elucidate.

It is fair to credit Wagner as a pioneer commentator on Jews in music (though as will be shown he was not the first in this field). Before his initial outburst in 1850 (and even until his more flagrant second assault on the topic in 1869), there seems to have been limited intellectual discussion of Jews specifically as musicians, although there was plenty about Jews and society as a whole. With this in mind, my title derives directly from the Wagner essay, which has been generally known in English, since Ashton Ellis’s original rendition of the 1890s, as Judaism in Music. But ‘Judentum ' cannot be simply equated with the English word ‘Judaism’, which generally applies specifically to the religious beliefs and practices of the Jew, an aspect not touched upon by Wagner, and indeed of which he was generally ignorant. Magee more

44 Arendt (1968). 44 H.g. Katz (1986), Rose (1992). 4:1 E.g chapters in Magee (1988) and Magee (2000).

24 Jewry in Music I. Preface: Scope, Intention and Structure

carefully calls the essay ‘Jewishness in Music’, and this reflects a wider sense of ‘Judentum ’. 46

But there was another important sense of ‘ Judentum’, specifically pejorative, current in mid-nineteenth century German, and indeed played upon by Marx in his 1843 essay On the , meaning ‘ haggling’.47

The word ‘Judentum’ does not in fact occur in the original magazine articles by to which Wagner’s essay was, in theory, a response - although Uhlig mentions ‘ J u d e n m u s ik and a ‘ Judenschule’ supposedly writing in the style of

4 0 Meyerbeer. Wagner specifically chose the word for his title; and although there is debate as to whether or not Wagner was aware of Marx’s writings, there can be little doubt that he also meant this ‘economic’ sense of ‘ Judentum ’ to resonate - one of the clear messages of his text is what he claimed to see as the degrading commercialisation of opera by Meyerbeer. And the involvement of Jews in the opera and music ‘business’ in general in the nineteenth century is prima facie a major topic to be examined in the present survey. I therefore advance ‘Jewry in Music’, with its more comprehensive range of meanings (as well as its slightly aggressive undertone), as a better title for Wagner’s essay in English, and as the banner under which this investigation may set forth.

Some comment should be made on the word ‘’. I seek to limit use of this word to its strict nineteenth-century sense as covering opinions that seek to restrict, prevent or withdraw the political rights of Jews in civil society, as distinct from Jew- hatred or Judeophobia, which may (or may not) include antisemitism in their expression. Apart from a regard for lexical accuracy, this restriction is justified so as to ensure that the twentieth-century connotations of antisemitism, extending to Nazi policy and practice, should not influence this study.

‘Genetic’ does not even enter the picture in the period under survey. Mendel’s genetic theories were not developed until the 1860s, and were then forgotten until the

46 Magee (2000) 71. 47 Marx (1992) 238 and note 37. Cf. the nineteenth-century Hnglish usages, the verb “to jew ’ and the ‘jewing down’ (vide Oxford English Dictionary). 48See section IV below.

25 Jewry in Music I. Preface: Scope, Intention and Structure

1900s. Nor were Jews of the early nineteenth century considered a ‘race’, in the colloquial sense that word has today. At this time, the concept of race was in its infant days, arising from nationalism and determined by cultural and linguistic affiliation, rather than from allegedly ‘scientific’ principles and characterised by biological considerations. These nationalist concepts were themselves still relatively young. The ill-will expressed towards Jews in the period of this study was still generally rooted in its traditional and clerical forms. Anti-Jewish feeling expressed at this time is therefore better understood in terms of ‘traditional’ anti-Jewish sentiment then widespread in all layers of society, than in terms of the developing anti-Jewish philosophies of the nationalist academics, of which relatively few who expressed such sentiment were even aware. This even applies to the first version of Das Judentum, despite attempts, notably by Rose, to link it intimately to the thought of German nationalist theorists.49

The appearance of Das Judentum in 1850 provides a convenient terminus for this study. There are other reasons why the mid-century is an appropriate break point. The end of the July monarchy, the of , and the retirement from the concert platforms of Liszt, Alkan and others all mark the end of an astonishing era of musical virtuosity and innovation that climaxed in Paris in the 1840s, in which a number of diverse prominent roles were played by Jews. Mendelssohn was dead; Meyerbeer’s last grand opera ( L'Africaine) was not to be performed until after his death in 1864, Moscheles and Hiller had largely removed from the concert hall to the musical conservatory. Heine was dying. The publisher had withdrawn from the fray. A notable chapter of Jewish engagement with the art of music had reached a conclusion.

But the close of this era is by no means the end of the story. If the foundations for Jewish involvement in Western music were laid in the first half of the century, its fruition belonged very much to the second half (where its status was affected anew by Wagner’s second, and rather different, charge to the anti-Jewish barricades in 1869); and beyond that lay its further transformation to a powerful presence in twentieth- century entertainment industry. These are issues for subsequent work.

4\See Rose (1992)6-39.

26 Jewry in Music I. Preface: Scope, Intention and Structure

4. Structure

From the above indications of the potential breadth and depth of the issues and narratives associated with the topic, it will be clear that to attempt a definitive, comprehensive and detailed survey of Jewish involvement in the musical life of Western Europe is beyond the scope of a 100,000-word dissertation. I intend rather to provide a framework, both conceptual and narrative, which might clearly define the issues involved and serve to assist further research and comment in this field.

The remainder of this dissertation is therefore structured in three sections which, were it itself a piece of music, might be entitled Theme, Variations and Coda’, with this preface forming a ‘Prelude’.

The ‘Theme’ section (‘Eppes Rores' - can a Jew be an Artist?) considers the extent to which Jews of the period might be equipped for association with music, both from their own point of view - in terms of skills and traditions - and in the perception (and prejudices) of the Gentile societies in which they resided.

The ‘Variations’ section (In the Midst o f Many Peoples), the most substantial of the three, examines in this context the careers of Jewish musical professionals in five significant geo-political societies of Western Europe up to about 1850 - the Netherlands, Britain, Austria, Germany, and France. These careers are contextualised within the differing interactions of the particular social, economic and political backgrounds of the societies considered; in the context of the Jewish communities of those societies; and in the context of the attitudes of those societies to Jews and to Judaism. As the theme of this study is specifically ‘entry’, detail of the mature careers of its subjects is frequently curtailed save where it throws light on the topic of access of Jews to, or the reception of Jews in, musical professions.

The ‘Coda’ section ( Jewry in Music) is a brief review of the specific origins of W agner’s Das Judentum in der Musik in the context of the foregoing material.

Appendices provide discussions on Judaism and Romanticism (Appendix I); and on the Jewish ambience of three notable composers (Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn and Alkan) (Appendix II). These are supplementary to, and illustrative of, issues discussed in the body of the dissertation.

27 Jewry in Music I. Preface: Scope, Intention and Structure

Partial family trees of the Beer, Mendelssohn and Itzig families are provided in Annex I. For convenience, a ‘timeline’ (for which no academic virtue is claimed) listing some major events in the world of music during the period is attached as Annex II.

Lastly 1 should mention that 1 have frequently been disconcerted (perhaps naively so) to discover that quotations, and citations in the works of others have not infrequently been inaccurate or even misleading. I have therefore sought to double­ check crucial citations from publications in the originals, and where possible in the original languages. Wherever 1 have made my own translations from other languages these are marked in the relevant footnote thus - (*) - so that I can be immediately blamed if it is found that I have made similar errors. Where, however, there are English translations which I believe to be reliable I have generally cited these rather than the originals. Caesurae and other matter in square brackets (thus [ ] ) are likewise my editorial insertions unless otherwise indicated.

28 Jewry in Music II: Eppes Rores

II. ‘Eppes Rores’ - Can a Jew be an Artist?

I want to present to you [...] my best pupil [...] [He’s] a fine young lad, merry and obedient. Actually, he’s a jewboy ( Judensohn ), but no Jew. By way of real sacrifice the father didn’t have his sons snipped and is bringing them up on the right lines; it would really be eppes Rores50 if for once a jewboy became an artist.51

Thus the twelve-year-old Felix Mendelssohn’s music tutor, the director of the Berlin Singakademie Karl Friedrich Zelter, writing to his friend Goethe in October, 1821. Zelter has been accused of ‘poor taste indeed’ in his comments, on the grounds that he was at the time receiving comfortable fees from his pupil’s father and was received by the family as a friend.52 But the context makes it perfectly clear that he was in his elephantine way writing humorously to Goethe, to whom he was a bosom friend as well as a trusted adviser on music. Whilst his phrases and attitude (perhaps owing something to his earlier parallel career as a stonemason) jar to a politically correct age, Zelter was simply expressing a bemusement which would have been common amongst the artistic elite of his time at a new phenomenon, and indeed a delight at his association with it.

Goethe himself had given a sharp and patronising opinion, some 50 years earlier in 1772, of the Poems of a Polish Jew published in German by one Issachar Falkensohn Behr:

It is extremely praiseworthy for a Polish Jew to give up business in order to learn German, to polish verses and devote himself to the Muses. But if he can do no more than a Christian etudiant en belles lettres , then he does wrong, we think, to make such a fuss about being a Jew.53

Behr, clearly, fell a long way short of being an artist; his anodyne outpourings were simply derivative. Here in fact we have an early (and exactly comparable) instance of

so = etwas Rares, (something rare), in imitation o f Jewish-German mauscheln. 51 BZGZ I 679 (*). 32 Werner (1963) 19. Botstein rather unreasonably refers to Zelter’s ‘anti-Semitism' in this letter; Botstein (1998) 212. 53 Quoted in Sachar (1990) 148.

29 Jewry in Music II: Eppes Rores

the ‘Morton’s fork’ evaluation of Jews in the arts which was eighty years later to be couched in its most explicit form by Wagner - either such Jews were academic imitators, like Mendelssohn, or, if they were innovative and successful, like Meyerbeer, they were only in it for the money. Nor should Goethe’s assumption that a Jew must inevitably be ‘in business’ be overlooked.54

In 1821 the Jew as a musical artist was clearly still a concept for Zelter. True, Mendelssohn was not his first Jewish pupil. The young Jakob Beer had been under his tuition for a couple of years in 1805-1807, but had made unsatisfactory progress; now, as , he was in Italy and writing the apprentice sub-Rossinian which, if the highly conservative Zelter knew of them at all, he would not have deigned to notice.

The notion that his present pupil could become a real artist clearly tickled Zelter pink. We may examine why this was so, by surveying what were the Jewish abilities, experience, potential and opinions relating to music, both perceived and actual; what were the prevalent ideas about the nature of the artist and his functions in society; and to what extent Jews could in contemporary opinion, and did in practice, partake of that nature and fulfil those functions. In addition we may consider the effect on these opinions, both Jewish and Gentile, of the Revolutionary watershed in European history from 1789 to the end of the Napoleonic wars, and of the new political and social ideas engendered in its aftermath; and the consequences of these new ideas themselves in the world of Jewish musicians in the first half of the nineteenth century.

54 Goethe was , however, not far from the mark in this case. Behr seems to have taken to academic life because his trade goods had been stolen in Konigsberg and he had nothing better to do than to inscribe himself at the University. He was later reported to as being 'kept in strict seclusion by his coreligionists in Breslau because of their fear lest he [...] convert to the Christian religion’. He did in fact convert, to the Greek Orthodox faith, in 1781. (See Altman (1973) 335-8).

30 Jewry in Music II: Eppes Rores

1. Jewish Musical Life in Europe Before the Period of Emancipation

Jewish life in the period before the era of emancipation was by no means devoid of music. But the virtual absence of Jewish professionals in formal music until the time of the French Revolution is not in itself surprising. The world of such music was circumscribed by the Church and the Court; only in the eighteenth century did the commercial theatre begin to provide an additional path, and in most of Europe that too was under the thumb of the Court. Virtually every career in ‘musique savante' in Europe therefore depended for its launch on family connections with music as a trade, on the Church or on aristocratic patronage, or on a combination of these factors, none of which were available to the Jews.55

Even had the unlikely urge to make a career in formal music manifested itself to an inhabitant of the ghetto, he would have faced insurmountable difficulties in indulging it. First, there were no independent facilities for training in such music (and private tuition would have cost money). More importantly, throughout Europe (with the partial exception of England) Jewish trade with gentiles was officially restricted to their traditional roles of commerce and finance, with only ancillary occupations such as peddling broadly tolerated. In addition many of the European capitals which offered the opportunity of making a living from secular music were closed to Jews: in France until the Revolution Jews were legally limited to the Rhine provinces and the former papal enclave of Comtat-Venaissin (although a blind eye was turned to the ‘New Christians’ of Bordeaux already mentioned); in , despite his European reputation as a sage, Moses Mendelssohn was unable during his lifetime to obtain residence licences in Berlin for his sons.56

These impediments are clearly illustrated in relief by the outstanding exception to such conditions in the period between the expulsion from Spain and the French

55 To these means of entry it may be worth adding military music to encompass the single example 1 have found: Isaac Herschel, oboist in the infantry band of Hanover, and father of the musician and astronomer Sir William Herschel (1738-1822). For the suggestion that Bernhard Schott (1748-1809), the founder of the famous music publishing company and originally a military clarinettist, was Jewish (see Gradenwitz (1996) 190), I have discovered no supporting evidence. 56 They were granted, as an exceptional favour, after his death.

31 Jewry in Music II: Eppes Rores

Revolution, that is, the court of the Gonzagas in in the sixteenth century. Here, despite the occasional enforcement of Papal rules discriminating against the Jews in terms of clothing and residence, exceptional tolerance, indeed indulgence, towards the Mantuan Jewish community encouraged a significant if brief Jewish musical flowering. The initial impetus to this seems to have been the duchess Isabella d’Este Gonzaga (1474-1539), who ruled the state after the death of her husband in 1509 and imported musicians and artists from all over Italy.

Many Jews were members of the Court ; one of these was Salomone Rossi (1578 -71628). Rossi himself was a member of a clan of Jewish musicians in Mantua, many of whom were often borrowed by neighbouring rulers, testifying to their quality and reputation. 57 Apart from some secular works, Rossi wrote unique choral settings, in polyphonic style, of thirty-three Hebrew hymns and (Hashirim asher li- Sh'lomo [ of ], 1623). There is nothing specifically Jewish in the music of these settings (unless it be a preference for minor keys), which are, however, stylish examples of the school of Monteverdi.

Rossi’s hymn settings were rather optimistically intended for use in the synagogue, and he obtained the backing of the Venetian and cultural pundit Leone da Modena, in a preface, to endorse the halachic propriety of such practice, anticipating a debate on synagogue music that would revive in force in the nineteenth century. Harran draws attention to another significant ‘first’ about the Shirim, that is, the technical achievement in dealing with printed Hebrew text, and the syllabic solution devised by the composer. In Leone’s words, ‘Salamone Rossi has, by his painstaking labours, become the first man to print Hebrew music’.58

Synagogue services a la Monteverdi did not, however, catch on - it was of course unrealistic to expect that this could ever be so - and the Jewish musical renaissance in Mantua was extinguished with the expulsion of the community in 1630 when the city was captured by the Austrians. No Jewish musical composition comparable to Rossi’s was printed in Europe in the next two hundred years, and very few significant Jewish

57 See Harran (1999) 184-188, 52. 58 Ibid. 211.

32 Jewry in Music II: Eppes Rores

musicians in the European formal traditions are recorded on the continent until the end of the eighteenth century.

That is emphatically not, however, to say that there was no continuing line of Jews operating as musicians in Gentile Europe, only that it may be difficult to identify such a line. The proposal of Winter already mentioned59 provides one possible source of continuity, but one which seems impossible to substantiate. String players turning up in the Netherlands and England in the eighteenth century may be part of another line of descent.60 And some ongoing musical development within the Italian Jewish communities themselves will be mentioned. But after the decline of the Mantuan court, major musical initiatives in European Jewry were to come overwhelmingly from the Ashkenazic communities.

The only formal musical traditions within these communities were those of the synagogue. Whilst representational art was prohibited or discouraged for scriptural reasons, the status of music within the Jewish religion was more debatable. Biblical references to musical instruments and singing abound and there were detailed traditions of the ceremonial music of the Temple (at least as regards the instruments involved). However, since the destruction of the Temple, rabbinic law discouraged or forbade the use of or musical instruments in the synagogue. As a consequence, the role of music in the synagogue was virtually limited to the singing of the chazan, the responses of the congregation and cantillation ( neginnot). Some aspects of the modes of cantillation and certain prayers probably extend in an unbroken tradition from Temple times.61 Some of the noble missinai melodies originating from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries were also preserved, to await their ‘rediscovery’ by Jewish liturgical reformers and Gentile musicians in the nineteenth century (for example, ’s 1881 setting of Kol Nidre). What was preserved in the eighteenth century (and is still preserved today) of these ancient chants, and especially of those associated with the oldest parts of the synagogue service such as the Amidah prayers and the neginnot, did, however, embody substantial differences from the

V) Sec p. 10. 60 See sections 3.2.2 and 3.3.4 61 For a discussion of the issues involved see Shiloah (1992), chs. 1- 2. Werner (1959) details the case for the ancient synagogue and Temple melodies surviving into the Christian service via plainchant.

33 Jewry in Music II: Eppes Rores

music of the world outside the synagogue, both melodic and harmonic. Moreover, as the music of the Gentile world gradually took on the characteristics with which we are today accustomed in terms of rhythm, temperament, and form, these differences became accentuated.

They began at the most basic level, that of intonation. Once music moved away from being principally or exclusively vocal and melodic - in particular where groups of instruments played together and needed to sound pleasant in harmony - the need for standard intonation became apparent. ‘Learned’ music in European courts and churches gravitated to equal temperament, whereby eventually the basic octave scale was subdivided into twelve equal semitones. J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (1722-1742) is a celebration of this development, which meant that for the first time it was possible to play music in any key on a keyboard instrument. This had important further consequences for musical development, enabling, for example, far-reaching changes of key and consequent large-scale structures based on harmonic ‘landscapes’. It also had the effect of erasing or diluting folk-traditions of singing, which were not based on equal temperament harmony and often included inflections unavailable in the new system, such as intervals of less than a semitone (micro-tones), as well as irregular rhythmic patterns. When the congregation sang in church, the organ and determined for them the four-square rhythm of hymns and the two melodic options which could be easily supported by harmony, the scales we know today as . These harmonic and melodic principles underlie all the music of what we now think of as the classical period.

Within the synagogue, however, where the organ and choir were extreme rarities if not actually proscribed, ancient musical techniques could and did survive. Melodies were not confined to ‘major’ or ‘minor’. A series of melodic ‘modes’ or steiger - not scales like the mediaeval church modes, but note patterns or melodic templates - underlay much of synagogue music. They were named after prayers with which they were associated - ‘ Adonai Malakh ’, ‘Magen Abot ’ and ‘ Ahavoh Raboh' are amongst them. The Torah and haftorah cantillation was (and is) determined by a set of neumes, fixedly allocated to the text. These modes and systems might be varied according to

34 Jewry in Music II: Eppes Rores

the season (or even the time of day).62 Those parts of the service sung either by the chazan or the scripture reader were (and are) of course subject to improvisation and the individual styles of the singers. This involves substantial rhythmic flexibility and variety of intonation (including micro-tones). Such music is therefore not amenable to reduction to the rhythmic, melodic and harmonic disciplines of musique savante.

As with the and the Talmud, however, synagogue music was held by the Jews themselves to be a relic of a glorious past, essentially unchangeable, an ‘icon’ of the music of the Temple. Jews in the period before emancipation would have met with astonishment or, rather, incomprehension, the very idea that music in the synagogue needed, or was susceptible to, ‘reform’ of any sort. But Jewish religious music was not immune from outside forces. The synagogues picked up many folk melodies from the countries where they were situated and the liturgy today is still full of tunes that can be tracked back to origins from Spain to . From about 1700 some synagogues began to have formal choirs supported by the congregation; others utilised bass singers and descants. Conflict of the old and the new within the synagogue may therefore be said to begin in many ways with its music. New styles and traditions entered the German synagogues with chazanim fleeing from the Chmelnicki massacres in the and Poland. But these Polish cantors were not learned and had neither the understanding, the interest, nor the ability to maintain or improve musical standards. Moreover, as the profession of chazan acquired status within wealthier communities, the chazan himself developed more of a solo role and might enliven his cadenzas with phrases or inflections from popular music (or even, in the eighteenth century, Italian opera). In 1733 a congregant complains

The custom of the chazanim in our generation is to invent tunes, and transfer tunes from the secular to the sacred [...] (they) run through the main prayers with such rapidity that even the swiftest horse could not follow them; while on the or Psalm tunes they spend so much effort and time that the angered congregants begin to converse.63

b* A detailed overview of these systems, which would be out of place in the present text, can be found in Werner (1976), chapters 4 and 5. 63 Quoted in Idelsohn (1992) 208-9.

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Throughout Germany, the introduction of choirs, organs, four-part harmony and florid in churches could not have gone unnoticed. In - motivated overtly perhaps more by the enthusiasm of Luria and the cabbalist movement for the Sabbath than by Gentile example - the synagogues even used organs and orchestras to accompany prayers on Sabbath eve. Heated but inconclusive debate ranged amongst the on such examples of ‘hukot hagoy ’ [imitation of the gentiles]. Amongst the first penances imposed on congregations by rabbis after local catastrophes or persecutions was often the prohibition of chazanut.

Although it is difficult to obtain a clear concept of the nature and standards of synagogue music in the Ashkenazic tradition which predominated in Western Europe at the turn of the eighteenth century, the clear consensus is that these were very basic. As Werner points out, at the very time when Western European music was beginning to blossom, amongst the Ashkenazi communities of Europe ‘between 1660 and 1720 the musical tradition was waning, and the second half of the eighteenth century witnessed its worst deca’.64 According to Idelsohn, ‘eighteenth-century manuscripts of Synagogue display a striking monotony of style and texts’,65 reflecting the absence of technical interest and musical inventiveness of most of their compilers.

The level to which synagogue practice descended is indicated by the English music historian ’s description of the service of the German congregation of Amsterdam in 1772. Even allowing for Burney’s obvious lack of sympathy with the proceedings, there is no reason to suppose his account to be too much of an exaggeration.

At my first entrance, one of the priests was chanting part of the service in a kind of ancient canto fermo, and responses were made by the congregation, in a manner which resembled the hum of bees. After this three of the sweet singers of Israel66 began singing a kind of jolly modern , sometimes in unison and sometimes in parts, to a kind of tol de

64 Werner (1976) 169. 65 Ibid. 213. 66 This epithet, derived from the description of King David in II Samuel, ch. 23 v. 1, was to he used ad nauseam by writers about Jewish musicians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, both in praise and, by their detractors, sarcastically.

36 Jewry in Music II: Eppes Rores

rol, instead of words, which to me, seemed very farcical [....] At the end of each strain, the whole congregation set up such a kind of cry, as a pack of hounds when a fox breaks cover [....] It is impossible for me to divine what idea the Jews themselves annex to this vociferation. f \7

We have in the account of the ‘trio’ a description of the keleichomos (literally ‘instruments of robbery’ ), the accompaniment of the chazan by bass and descant (meshorrer) which became a common practice in European synagogues in the early eighteenth century and had been introduced to Amsterdam by its Polish chazan, Michael ben Nathan of Lublin, between 1700 and 1712.69

Within this debased tradition nonetheless there was some notion of musical apprenticeship and training for a career. In a practice that seems to have begun around the sixteenth century,70 meshorrerim were attached as children to an existing chazan (sometimes their father; sometimes, promising candidates seem to have been kidnapped71) and travelled with him from congregation to congregation. The key career move was clearly to learn as many chants as possible; this would make the meshorrer attractive to other chazanim, demand for whom depended to some extent on variety and novelty of repertoire. The chazan would typically be responsible for his own singers, paying for them out of his own pocket. The meshorrer would flesh out the performance of the chazan by improvisation or wordless . Four- part harmonization, as in church, was, as already explained, unsuited for traditional Jewish steiger. When a chazan had extracted all he could from a meshorrer, the latter could expect to be cast aside as ‘a useless and empty shell’ and would have to seek his fortune elsewhere.72 Those who succeeded in ‘marketing’ themselves in this

67 Burney (1959) II 229. b8 See Idelsohn (1992) 207. The nickname came about as an acronym of ' chazan. meshorrer, singer' and is a sort of pun on (=klei zmir,' instruments of song’). 64 Ibid., 213. 70 Leon of Modena in 1605 refers to meshorrerim “as is customary all the time amongst the Ashkenazim’ (quoted in Goldberg (2002) 299). 71 Idelsohn (1992) 215 quotes the memoirs of Elkan Cohen (b. 1806), the son of a synagogue singer, Lipman Bass, who was “stolen’ at the age of 12 by a chazan and apprenticed to Yisroel of Prosnitz, with whom he travelled all over . 72 Iibid. 215-216.

37 Jewry in Music II: Eppes Rores

competitive world could hope, eventually, to establish themselves as chazanim with meshorrerim of their own.

The meshorrer practice began to die out within the first quarter of the nineteenth century, but many of those who were involved in the revival of Jewish music in that century, and not a few who became practitioners in secular music, benefited from its practical essentials of acceptable voice and extensive musical memory. Indeed the contraction of opportunities for meshorrerim may have been an encouragement to some to seek alternative musical careers. Thus although there may have been little substance in the actual music of the synagogue directly to inspire or equip a Jew for a musical career outside, its musical practices were by no means irrelevant.

Certainly the Hasidic movement, developing in Eastern Europe, had a special place for melody, and Hasidic chants also reflect to some extent the secular music of their environment; but as the purpose of was to render an exclusive personal bond between the singer and the divinity it provided no practical or theoretical base for a livelihood. As the nigimnim diffused from the rabbinical courts where they originated, they did, however, begin to influence chazamit.17.

Of course there was a significant secular Jewish musical tradition, klezmer. This term, as used in the present study, should be distinguished from the contemporary using the same name, the immediate roots of which do not date back more than perhaps fifty years. ‘Klezmer was originally a more or less generic word encompassing all . A klezmer was simply a secular musician. The present ‘klezmer revival’ began at a time when there were extremely few genuine klezmorim alive. Most of those were in the US and represented a specifically Rumanian tradition.74 Recordings or transcriptions of Jewish folk-music in Europe from the first half of the twentieth century are scarce; notated evidence of such music from before 1900 is almost non-existent. It is therefore difficult to discuss a ‘ klezmer

77 See Idelsohn (1992) 411-434. It is also interesting to note that the hasid Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav (1772-1810) seems to have had some understanding of musical notation. In his torah on ‘Azam ra' ( i will sing’. Ps. 146 v.2) which talks of the renewal in life through collecting 'Good Points’, there seems to be an implication that musical tones - points in printed music - may be amongst the points to be sought. 74 See Shiloah (1992) 19-20.

38 Jewry in Music II: Eppes Rores

tradition’, for the question of the validity of transmission is extremely dubious; thus present day ‘ klezmer music should be kept out of mind in the following discussion.

Klezmorim were skilled professionals who were also often highly regarded (and hired) by Gentiles. Klezmer bands were active in and Prague from at least the fifteenth century, and were important civic assets, often playing on state occasions.75 The characteristics of klezmer music were themselves inevitably influenced by synagogue music (as synagogue music was influenced by that of the world outside). The synagogue modes inflected much of Jewish popular music. One favourite was the ‘Ahavoh Raboh ’ mode, which featured the progression ‘tonic - minor second - major third’, and has become irrevocably associated with present-day ‘ klezmer’ music. It is interesting that this mode, which is broadly similar to the Phrygian church mode, is known in Yiddish as the ‘ freygish’ mode, which would show some consciousness of the parallel. However, Werner argues that it only entered Jewish folk-music as late as the seventeenth century, via Cossack music. Local of course often informed the klezmer of different regions.

Klezmer was undoubtedly a vital force amongst Central European communities in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries (and up to the early twentieth century in Eastern Europe). A striking example of how such music might come into contact with the formal European music profession is given in his autobiography by the virtuoso and composer Frantisek (Franz) Benda (1709-1786) (himself the member of one of the major European musical dynasties, of which twelve members have entries in Grove).

My father [...] forced me to play (the violin) in taverns, which I utterly disliked. In those days, an old Jew, whose name was Leibl, and who was bom blind, used to play for dancing in another tavern. He was a man with quite excellent gifts for music. He himself composed the pieces he played and played exactly and very clearly, even the high notes, and he was able to make his instrument sound exceedingly sweet, although his violin was not particularly good. I often followed him to have the opportunity to

7

39 Jewry in Music II: Eppes Rores

think about the way he played and I must honestly admit that I received more stimulation from him than from my master.77

It is notable that the outstanding characteristics of Leibl’s technique - sweetness and clarity - are consistent with those typically attributed to Jewish violinists of later and the present ages. These comments by Benda are perhaps the earliest professional 78 unbiased assessment of a Jewish musician by a Gentile.

This encounter may have had far-fetched consequences. Benda, who eventually became violinist at the court of , was highly regarded as an innovative player and is regarded as the founder of a German school of violin playing (as opposed to the Italian style which was previously uniformly adopted). It is not far­ fetched to propose that the example of Leibl, so powerfully recalled and described by Benda forty years after the event, may have played not only a significant role in the creation of Benda’s own style, but in that of his pupils and successors, and thus in what became the German violin tradition.79

Apart from performing at social celebrations such as weddings and circumcision ceremonies, Jewish musicians sometimes played, despite the Rabbinical ban, in synagogue services and in Purimshpils, the satirical stage plays of the story of performed at the festival of . Their popularity outside the ghettos, and the resentment of gentile musicians at this success, is instanced by many attempts to forbid them to perform for gentiles or for Christian festivals (or even sometimes for Jewish weddings, which perhaps might have attracted non-Jewish spectators). 80 This involvement with music as ‘entertainment’, rather than as ‘art’, also has a role as regards the later participation of Jews in the wider musical professions.

It seems in fact that the Yiddish Purimshpil had distinct musical traditions although we have little trace of them; theAkta Ester im Akhashveyresh, first published in Prague in 1720, announced on its title page that it had been performed in a theatre in

77 Quoted in translation in Nettl (1951) 212. 78 The suggestion that Benda himself came from a Jewish family, based on a supposed derivation of the name from Ben-David (Heart/ (1988) 510) is a fantasy. Benda is a very common peasant surname. 79 ‘Since his [Benda’s] time one learns violin playing after his method in the Royal Prussian Musikakademie - today naturally called the German school - and I am perhaps its last representative’. , quoted in Benda (1981) x. 80 See Nettl (1951) 32-4.

40 Jewry in Music II: Eppes Rores

Prague with and other instruments, with actors who were the pupils of Rabbi David Oppenheim who had lent his approval to the performance. Later in the century Mordkhe un Ester was printed, boldly describing itself as ‘eyne komise operete in eynen oyftsug fun Reb Lib Tsimbler’.81 The purimshpil was renowned for its lavishness and, being the only theatrical production available during the period of Lent, attracted many foreigners and tourists. It has indeed been suggested that Handel may have seen a performance of the purimshpil ‘ and ’ before leaving Venice in 1710, and that this may have been an inspiration for his first English biblical , Esther (1718).82 Purimshpil texts in Yiddish, with indications for songs, were published all over Europe throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries . We have the evidence of the London actor and singer James De Castro, brought up as a Talmud scholar, that as a boy in the 1770s he

and [his] school-fellows got up plays and farces in commemoration of the Puerim, that is, the festival of the hanging of Haman, a custom strictly observed by the Jews.84

This experience encouraged him and his friends to frequent the London theatres and turned his thoughts to the stage as a career.

Idelsohn suggests that, as Jewish musicians played at communal festivities, ‘it is quite natural that chazanim learned from [them] the reading of music and the playing of instruments’.85 As regards reading of music this is wildly optimistic, as the musicians themselves learnt, like the meshorrerim, by ear. But examples quoted by Idelsohn include the Prague chazan Lipman Katz Popper (d. 1650), eulogised by a contemporary as ‘skilled as a master in several instruments and a brilliant improviser’, and Susskind of Offenbach (father of ‘Jew Suss’) who led a travelling band of musicians in the 1710s. Doubtless interest in instrumental music will have led some chazanim to study notation, and hence the notebooks we find compiled by some of

81 Frakes (1997) 57. Reb Lib’s surname seems to indicate he is a - playing klezmer. 82 Ringer (1961) 22. Unfortunately the date of Handel’s departure from Venice, no later than 10 March (see Hogwood (1988) 47), renders this theory unlikely. 83 For a partial bibliography see Beregovski (2001) 136-146. 84 De Castro (1824) 3-4. 85 Idelsohn (1971) 207.

41 Jewry in Music II: Eppes Rores

them towards the end of the eighteenth century. And of course religious or synagogue tunes also formed part of the klezmer repertory. Even in the 1920s Kiselgof and Engel were recording Hasidic and synagogue melodies from Ukrainian klezmorim. Crossover between the sacred and profane Jewish musical traditions was therefore a vital element in the Jewish communities.

There was a strong tradition of Jewish musical bands throughout Bohemia and this may have prepared the ground for the rich crop of Jewish professional musicians from this region in the early nineteenth century.87 Bohlman considers the lost music of the Jewish communities of the Black Forest region, and laments that while we know it existed, we have hardly any traces of what it actually sounded like. Doubtless it survives in ways and forms in which we can no longer specifically identify it; but ‘the music of the Central European village does not lend itself to historicism in the same way as the revival of the Yiddish folk song’.88

The Yiddish folk song was indeed a vigorous form of Jewish musical culture, although in its pre-nineteenth century manifestations it is generally of more interest to the historian for its texts, rather than its rarely identifiable music. Printed song-sheets in Yiddish might often contain interesting accounts of plagues or other disasters affecting Jewish communities, but as regards music might simply suggest a choice of melodies which would be well-known to the purchaser. For a 109-verse account of the plague in Prague in 1713, the tunes proposed include the ‘ Akedah ’ synagogue chant, a German folk-tune and ‘the song of the Martyrs of Prostajev’. As the latter was originally printed in 1684, this suggests that some tunes had a good staying power via oral tradition.89 Idelsohn’s analyses of Ashkenazi folk-song melodies from Western Europe indicate an overwhelming provenance from Gentile folk song. In Western Europe this tradition died out as emancipation proceeded in the nineteenth century, although in the Eastern European communities the tradition, which was more purely

86 See Dubrovyna et al. (2001), Kruchin et al. (2004). 87 Nettl (1951) 37-39 cites amongst others, all born between 1814 and 1825, the Schulhoff, Tedesco, Goldschmidt, Strakosch and Lebert, and the violinists Ernst, Hauer and Joachim. 88 Bohlman (1993) 19. 89 Turniansky (1988) 191.

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oral and contained a significant proportion of Jewish element in its melody, continued virtually until the time of the Shoah.

Apart from the occasional infiltration of popular and operatic music into the synagogue service referred to above, there is little direct evidence of Jewish interest in external formal musical trends before the eighteenth century. Only late in the eighteenth century were the few privileged rich Jewish families of Berlin beginning to give their children an aristocratic style of education which included music tuition. This was an early sign of a Jewish desire and ability to buy into gentile culture as part of a process of entry to European society, which was to form an important element of Jewish-gentile relations in the nineteenth century.

When, however, arriviste German Jewish families sought to acquire the necessary social graces, musical accomplishment was thought to be a suitable piece of social equipment for daughters rather than the basis for a career for sons. For men music might be an acceptable hobby, perhaps. Ignaz, ne Isaak, Moscheles (b. 1794), whose father was a prosperous cloth merchant in Prague, relates:

My father [...] played the guitar, and sang as well. [...] [H]e used constantly to say, ‘one of my children must become a thoroughbred musician’ - words which made me desire that I might be that one child. My father began, however, with my eldest sister.90

Moscheles took over the lessons when his sister’s teacher persuaded his father that he was a better bet. Felix Mendelssohn too followed at first in his elder sister Fanny’s footsteps as a pupil of Zelter, but their father was already writing to her in 1820 (when she was 14 and Felix 11):

Music will perhaps become his [Felix’s] profession, while for you it can and must be only an ornament, never the root of your being and doing.91

Seventeen years later Felix himself is atypically pompous (and specious) in derailing any hope of Fanny establishing a reputation as a composer, now that she is married to

90 C. Moscheles (1873) I 2. 91 Hensel (1881) 1 82, letter of 16 July 1820.

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the artist Hensel, despite his mother’s request to help Fanny in publishing her compositions.

[...] [F]rom my knowledge of Fanny I should say that she has neither inclination nor vocation for authorship. She is too much all that a woman ought to be for this. She regulates her house, and neither thinks of the public nor of the musical world, nor even of music at all, until her first duties are fulfilled. Publishing would only disturb her in these, and I cannot say that 1 approve of it.92

These comments tend to support the suggestion of Nancy Reich that the constraints placed on Fanny reflected ‘the power of class’. She quotes the comments of Mendelssohn’s friend, the critic Chorley:

Had Madame Hensel been a poor man’s daughter, she must have become known to the world by the side of Madame Schumann and Madame Pleyel, as a female pianist of the very highest class.93

This analysis seems to be borne out in other societies - in London, for example, where the Abrams sisters and their like could become concert performers,94 but where there is no evidence of the daughters of the moneyed Jewish families, despite their tuition by the most fashionable masters, appearing on stage. The Jewish female experience in all, in this respect, does not appear to have been significantly different to that of their gentile sisters.

92 Mendelssohn (1864) 113. Letter to Lea Mendelssohn of June 24 1837. To be fair, Mendelssohn also applied this need for constant publication to himself, as can be seen from the reported discussion in Lobe (1991), 191. 93 Cited in N. Reich (1991) 86. ‘Madame Schumann’ is Clara, nee Wieck, the wife of Robert Schumann; ‘Madame Pleyel’ was the daughter-in-law of the pianist and piano-maker Ignace Pleyel, and a pupil of Moscheles and Kalkbrenner. 94 III.3.6.1

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2. Transferable Skills

The above suggests some elements of Jewish musicality that may have informed Jewish musical practitioners in the period of emancipation.

We may consider here some broader cultural, but not specifically musical, issues which should be examined for relevance to our topic. There was a variety of traditions amongst Jews, both arising intrinsically from Jewish religious practice, and arising consequent to the historical relationship of Jewish communities with their gentile neighbours, which may have had positive significance in equipping them for a musical career in post-revolutionary Europe.

One line of enquiry may proceed from the acknowledged principle, in the modem practice of human resources training, that transferable skills are of as great importance in professional development as direct skills.

Three skills which are essential to the practitioner of music - and especially to the performer - are memory, routine (iteration and perfection of physical and mental processes) and analysis. It is at least highly suggestive that these same three skills form an essential part of that mainstay of traditional Jewish intellectual culture, study of the Talmud. The obvious parallel between the rabbinic Jewish ilui (‘wunderkind’) and the musical child prodigy may perhaps reinforce this perception.

In this context, the ethno-musicological analysis of present-day training undertaken by Lionel Wolberger takes on particular interest,95 as it indicates the close interrelationship that continues to exist between musical cues and practices and talmudic learning and teaching techniques. The importance of memory for the meshorrer who wished to survive his apprenticeship has already been noted.

Furthermore it may be remarked that the induction of the Jewish male to the community at the traditional bar- takes the form, in effect, of an extended musical performance: the recital of a substantial portion of the Torah for which the vowels and cantillation need to be accurately memorised and reproduced.96 Moreover,

45 Wolberger (1993) 110-136. % I am indebted for this observation to a conversation with Mr Jeremy Paxman.

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this performance takes place before a highly informed (and potentially critical) audience.

In addition certain indirectly related Jewish skills (or perhaps modes of behaviour would be a better description) have potential relevance.

In particular we may note the profession widely adopted by Jews at this period (and for which they were regularly roundly condemned), that of being a peddler or middleman. Of course this was about the only occupation open to Jews who sought a living in commerce with Gentiles, the and primary production trades being fairly universally closed to them. Nonetheless this exclusion taught them how they might live by exploiting the inefficiencies of the economies where they lived, by identifying unsatisfied demand and seeking sources of supply - that is the essence of successful peddling and its equally non-prestigious successor, commercial travelling. It also gave the Jewish community familiarity with credit and the money economy at a time when these functions were not widely familiar. Those who were particularly shrewd in these areas of commerce laid the foundations of the first great Jewish fortunes by undertaking military supplies, and thence managing the finances of many of the German courts; such was the origin of many of the Hoffaktoreti.

The sources of supply were likely to be distant from the market of demand, but here the Jew had an advantage over the more complacent and hearth-loving Gentile - he could travel and be fairly sure of finding co-religionists wherever he went who could help him on his quest. Thisde facto, if informal, Jewish network was relied on by Jewish dealers and merchants.97 Its existence, in the days when the concept of globalisation was inconceivable, could give apparent substance to allegations of absence of local (and later national) loyalty amongst Jews. Moreover, the need of the Jewish trader to travel widely, and to accommodate himself amongst the different societies he encountered, further necessitated the development of skills of cultural as well as linguistic interpretation, essential for the rapport between artist and audience.

Finally we may consider briefly some interesting negative evidence - the absence until quite late in the nineteenth century of any notable Jewish participation in the

97 See e.g. the autobiography of Gliickel of Hameln, passim (Gliickel, (1977)).

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world of representational art. This correlates with the dearth of any appropriate Jewish cultural transferable skills in this field. Extrapolating from the commandment against creating a graven image, rabbinic authorities were consistently hostile to any form of painting or sculpture.

Our Rabbis taught: The writing under a painting or an image may not be read on the Sabbath. And as for the image itself, one must not look at it even on weekdays, because it is said, Turn ye not unto idols.98

Subsequent rabbinic decisions included rulings that (for example) one might depict a head, or a body, but not the two together.99 Clearly this regime was not friendly to the development of representational art and examples of European Jewish art (at least in Western Europe),100 with the exception of ceremonial artefacts, decorated synagogues and illumination of manuscripts, are few and far between in the period before emancipation. Unfortunately the only large-scale study on the emergence of Jewish artists in the nineteenth century101 includes hardly any discussion of the situation before 1800. Moritz Oppenheim (1800-1882), the only Jew to make any substantial mark in the representational arts in the first half of the nineteenth century, does not seem, however, to owe any of his skill to his traditions. Brought up in a devout home in the ghetto of Hanau, he was enabled by the Napoleonic emancipation to attend the local Drawing School where his talent revealed itself. But his career points out interesting differences between representational art and music as professions for Jews. Oppenheim specialised - indeed, virtually cornered the market - for bourgeois Jewish patrons. In conservative Biedermeier style, albeit with great panache, he painted portraits of Jewish notables such as Ludwig Boeme and Lionel Nathan de , and presented scenes of Jewish bourgeois life and sentimentality. His most famous canvases include the self-explanatory The Return of the Jewish Volunteer from the Wars of Liberation to His Family Still Living in Accordance with Old Customs (1834, now in the Jewish Museum, ) and a

48 Talmud: Tractate Shabhath 149a. Freedman (1938) II 759. 99 Shulkhan Arukh, Yareh Deah 141.70. See van Voolen (1996). 100 The ‘illuminated’ synagogues of Poland are an exception perhaps proving the rule. For a discussion of the relationship of figurative art to idolatry in Jewish thought and see Kochan (1997), which also comments (106-110) on the more favoured status of music in these systems. 101 Goodman (2001).

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reconstruction of an (imaginary) meeting between Goethe, Moses Mendelssohn and Lavater (1856, in the Judah L. Magnus Museum, Berkeley, California). Oppenheim was clearly able to exploit a niche market amongst upwardly-mobile Jewish clients - by applying Gentile techniques and bourgeois taste to Jewish topics - but there would not have been room for many to make a living in this field. Music offered a larger market with unrestricted customers and hence better opportunities.

All the above factors will have had a part to play in the context of the Jewish experience in the musical professions.

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3. Can a Jew Have Taste?

All these ‘pre-qualifications’, by culture, nature, and experience, for music as a Jewish profession were largely unknown to non-Jewish professionals in the arts such as Zelter; and had they known of them, they would have discounted them as irrelevant. This would account in part for Zelter’s amusement at the novelty of a Jewish artist. But it will also, in no small amount, owe something to traditional prejudice and something to the developing debate about the position of the Jew in society, which by 1821 was in full swing.

The question of the Jew arose almost immediately from eighteenth-century debate on the structure of society. Jews formed only a tiny proportion of the population of the Western European countries where the ideas of the Enlightenment were in play. In the estimates provided by Katz,102 the 40,000 Jews of France represented 2 per mil of the population, the 75,000 in Germany less than 1 per cent, the 100,000 in 1.4%. The highest proportion was to be found in the Netherlands (50,000 = 2%). But any attempt to prepare a rational account of society as it stood needed to deal with the many anomalies which attended this small but conspicuous fragment which was to be labelled as ‘a state within the state’.103 Here was an unmistakably separate people, spread throughout the countries of Europe, amongst themselves obedient to Talmudic and Biblical laws, but regulated in most countries, where they were not entirely excluded, by state laws, obligations and prohibitions applying exclusively to them. This ‘apartheid’ was quite aside from (or perhaps, rather, mutually reinforced by) traditional Jew-hatred. These regulations in general had a feudal aspect, in the sense that Jews within a political domain were regarded as a source of revenue for its ruler, rather than as a class of humanity. The Court Jews of a slightly earlier period, and the exceptionally wealthy Jewish families of late eighteenth century Germany, were symptoms of, rather than exceptions to, such attitudes and though influential as mediators were only, in numbers, a minute proportion of Jewry as a whole, a fraction of a fraction. Descriptions of a rational, sovereign, uniform state would have to come to terms with these awkward peas beneath the mattress.

102 Katz (1980) 9-10. 103 Ibid. 58.

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On the one hand attempts at such descriptions, and the proposed remedies accompanying them, would eventually raise hopes for the cause of acceptance and equality for Jews amongst their fellows; unfortunately, enlightenment proved in the event a double-edged weapon and could also be used to reformulate atavistic prejudices in ‘reasoned’ guises. After all, one logical solution to the problem of the Jews was to take them out of the equation by demanding their conformity to the standards of the rational society and blaming the obstinacy and the turpitude of the Jews themselves for the problems they faced. The story of Jewish emancipation is well covered in numerous studies; but underlying, or parallel with, the issue of Jewish civic rights, which emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, there was the question of the extent to which a Jew could, by his nature, be considered civilised at all.

In this context it is relevant to note in passing how Jews themselves were actually represented in music of the eighteenth century. In Germany the Jews were a prominent feature of settings of the Passion and the tradition had developed since the time of Luther of representing their comments as reported in the Gospels ( turba ) in complex and often intense choral passages. This was a natural development from the traditional Latin masses. Even since early times, when the whole passion story was simply chanted by a deacon in the appropriate mode, he was instructed, according to the writer Durardus (d. 1296) that the ‘words of Christ should be sung with sweetness’ but that those of ‘the most impious Jews’ should be enunciated ‘clamose et cum asperitate' (in a loud and harsh manner).104 This aspect was carried on in the German Passion settings by Luther’s musical adviser Walter, and will have chimed with the Jew-hatred which was an element of Luther’s church. The effect of these settings, as with the whole Lutheran service, on the populace, is known to have been striking, as for the first time they were able to understand the meanings of the words used in Church. Inevitably the experience will also have coloured their mental image of, and attitude to, Jews, in a musical context, and perhaps in other contexts as well.

As with other aspects of Passion settings these turba reached a peak in the work of (1685-1750). Bach, bom in Eisenach, the birthplace of Martin

l(w Smallman (1970), 22.

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Luther, was brought up and lived throughout in the pure Lutheran tradition. In the St John Passion of 1724 we generally hear the Jews (sung by the chorus) making harsh interjections or demands, characterized by general absence of melodic line (often in fact by implacable chromatic scales) and by dense, aggressive, counterpoint.105 In the St Matthew Passion of 1727 the Jewish crowd has a smaller part but is presented in much the same way when it pronounces ‘He is worthy of death’ and mocks the brutal treatment of , or opts for Barabbas in a dramatic shout on a

1 / u . chord. The melodic line for ‘Let him be crucified’ significantly includes the augmented fourth interval (g-c#) known to musicians as ‘diabolus in m usica\ ‘the devil in music’, frequently associated with pain and anguish in musical word-painting. Such passages often contain a ‘double-sharp’, which both suggests increased musical tension, and (represented as it is in musical notation by the symbol ‘X ’) is a direct ‘depiction’ of the Cross.

It is not fanciful to suggest that such musical characterization, which can also be detected less strikingly in settings of the Passion by Schutz (1585-1672) and lesser German masters such as Selle,107 could be intended as a reflection of the charmlessness or indeed formlessness of Jewish music as perceived by trained musicians, such as the theorists Forkel and Mattheson discussed below. So strikingly different in this respect were the German masses from their Latin antecedents that Felix Mendelssohn, listening to a Passion by the Spanish composer Victoria (1585), commented, at the chorus’s cry of “ Barabbam!”, ‘Very tame Jews, indeed!’ * 108

The eighteenth-century standard bearer for the secular attack on the Jews was ironically the writer who ‘did more than any other single man to shape the rationalistic trend that moved European society towards improving the status of the Jews’,109 namely, . For Voltaire, attacking the Jews was a way in which he could ‘acceptably’ attack , by demeaning the status of those whose role had been to prefigure the arrival of the , and thereby trash the Judaeocentric

105 J.S. Bach, St John Passion, nos. 21, 23 and 25. 106 J. S. Bach, St Matthew Passion, nos. 42, 43 and 54. 107 See the extract from his St John Passion (1643) quoted in Smallman (1970) 65. l08Mendelssohn (1862), 185. (Letter of 16 June 1831 to Zelter). 109 Katz (1980) 34.

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history of Bossuet which Voltaire so despised. At the time Voltaire was writing (he died in 1778) there was of course not even any question, in Continental Europe, of accommodating the social or political status of Jewry - and indeed during his lifetime Jews were officially forbidden to even live in France. Nevertheless, the relish with which he undertook the assault on Judaism, and the frequency with which he returned to it, indicates that his anti-Judaism must have been personal as well as theoretical.

The techniques Voltaire employed in discussing Jewry were derived from the long tradition of his orthodox Christian predecessors. With the Church he stressed the immutable nature of the Jew; from Eisenmenger, the author of the influential Entdecktes Judenthum (‘Jewry Uncovered’, 1710) he adapted the use of citing twistable selected quotations out of their context; from anti-Jewish popular tradition he employed malicious mockery, and the assertions that their religion was a sham, and that their sole interest was money. When, however, he tweaked the approach of Reason in his writings on the Jews, he also effectively gave licence to future commentators to employ similar tactics. In the 1772 edition of the Essai sur les moeurs he writes:

When the society of man is perfected, when every people carries on its trade itself, no longer sharing the fruits of its work with these wandering brokers, the number of Jews will necessarily diminish. The rich among them are already beginning to detest their superstition; there will be no more than a lot of people without arts [my italics] or laws, who, no longer able to enrich themselves through our negligence, will no longer be able to sustain a separate society, and who, no longer understanding their ancient corrupt jargon, a mixture of Hebrew and Syrian, ignorant even of their own books, will assimilate amongst the scum of the other peoples.110

Katz notes in this passage a prophecy of the analysis of in his article On ,111 he might also have pointed out a presaging of the very which both Marx and Wagner employ at the end of their on the Jews.

110 Quoted in Katz (1980) 47. 111 See below. Appendix I 323.

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Voltaire’s dismissal is a direct ancestor of Wagner’s now notorious ‘Untergang’ at the end of Das Judentum in der Musik.

It is clear from elsewhere in Voltaire’s writings that inability to respond to culture must exclude Jewry from participation in civilized society. Indeed, the absence of a culture of its own is one of the reasons that he advances in the Essai sur les moeurs

11') for dismissing the Jews from serious consideration as a nation. "

Voltaire was of course not the only person to feel that the pretensions of the Jews to art and culture were mere flummery. The quizzical sarcasm of Dr Burney at an Amsterdam synagogue has already been quoted. Earlier in the century the theorist Matthesson had described synagogue music as a

Hebrew gasconade [...] a few garbled and conjectural curiosities, which are not at all mysterious, and are as useful to the modem composer as a fifth wheel to a wagon.113

The historian and biographer of J. S. Bach, J. N. Forkel, was at pains to explain why this was so:

The presence of numerous sibilants, spirants, plosives and diphthongs forces the closing of the lips in various ways, and the mouth into all sorts of movements - as is the case with Hebrew, so it stands to reason that it is impossible to adapt it to song.

Forkel has further interesting comments to make on ‘Jewish taste’; contemporary Hebrew song, he claims, is adapted to German style by the surrender of ‘non­ rhythmic’ patterns and original modes that lie ‘somewhere between our intervals’. But the Jews of whom he enquired were

so uninformed in musical matters and so infatuated with anything that pertains to their divine services, that their explanations were full of exaggerations and prejudices.114

112 See Katz (1980) 39-41. 113 Mathesson in Das neu-Erdffnete Orchester (1713), quoted in Hohenemser (1980) 65. 114 Ibid. 69-70, quotations from Forkel’s General History of Music (1788).

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We do not need necessarily to conclude that this attitude resulted purely from anti- Jewish feeling; Forkel was a stickler for the ‘rules’ of music as he understood them and roundly condemned all who infringed them.115 These comments are particularly interesting in that they reveal that Forkel (and perhaps Matthesson) had correctly discerned the ‘non-conforming’ characteristics of rhythm and steiger in the synagogue chant; but, because these elements could not be construed within the existing canons of educated Gentile taste, they simply rejected them as absurdities.

Something of this unfamiliarity, or rather ‘otherness’, may have lingered and may explain the fascination that some Jewish opera singers, later in the eighteenth century, had for their audiences. The English Jewish singers Leoni and Braham, both of whom began their careers as meshorrerim (and whose careers will be discussed in more detail in section III.3 of this study) elicited interesting comments in this respect. Of Leoni it was written that

the truth is, that Leoni hasno voice at all - his tones being neither vocal nor instrumental. They have a peculiarity of soul in them that we never heard before.116

Sheridan, in whose Duenna Leoni made a great hit, wrote to the composer Thomas Linley the elder:

1 think I have heard you say you never heard Leoni [...] I should tell you that he sings nothing well, but in a plaintive or pastoral style: and his voice is such as appears to me to be hurt by very much accompaniment.117

Of Braham, The Harmonicon writes in a laudatory review of his career in 1832:

One accomplishment, in which Mr. Braham exceeds every other singer of his own, or, as far as we know, any former time, is the skill with which he has assimilated his falsetto to his chest voice, so that although the difference of tone at the extremes of the passage is discernible, the

115 See the discussions of Forkel’s place in eighteenth-century music criticism in Morrow (1997). 116 Magazine, ‘Critique on the Theatrical Merits of Mr Leoni’, June 1777, quoted in Walsh (1973)231. 117 Sheridan (1966) III 88-9.

54 Jewry in Music II: Eppes Rores

exact point at which he passes from one to the other is beyond detection by the nicest ear 18

Some of these qualities are reflected in Rowlandson’s caricature (Illustration II. 3-D contrasting the bluff straightforward English singer Incledon with the florid Braham: a contrast evinced by the bearing of the singers themselves, the behaviour of their music on their staves (Braham’s is marked ‘Allegro Squekando’) and the enthusiasms of their Gentile and Jewish audiences - the former on the left offering the standard ‘Encore’, the latter on the right exclaiming ‘Mine Cod, How he shing!’

r- .. V M « ft

& CfcMIL/ Q JAAK

Illustration 11.3.1 - Incledon and Braham in 'Family Quarrels’: Print by Rowlandson, 1802 (Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America)______The interesting incident which prompted Rowlandson’s is discussed elsewhere,119 but for the present it is of interest to note that the qualities for which Leoni and Braham are here praised - their ‘head’ voice falsetto, their plaintive expressiveness (in Leoni’s case not pleasantly compatible with harmonic accompaniment), their runs and their sometimes exaggerated passion - are all consistent with synagogue practice of the eighteenth century, and are all (with the exception of their ability at ‘divisions’) such as would have invoked the censure of

1.8 Harmonicon 1832 part 1, 3. 1.9 III.3.6.3

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Forkel and Mattheson, and indeed of connoisseurs in general of the early eighteenth century.

What had happened in between was not simply the ‘acculturation’ of Leoni and Braham, as Jews, to the standards of a Forkel (although there was of course an element of this), but a shift in public taste away from the formal demands of the traditional purism towards the more exotic and romantic. Taste was no longer the fixed set of ideals posited by the beacons of the Enlightenment: when art escaped the grasp of the few and entered the market-place, taste became led by the demands of the audiences, not the strictures of the pundits.

Jews thus perhaps had advantages in not being captives of the artistic strictures of the past; not only could they adapt painlessly to new demands, but, in the new age of artistic romanticism, their very otherness could prove a part of their assets. At the same time, that otherness could be seized upon by those who regarded themselves as guardians of tradition, overtly as evidence of a threatening debasement of standards or of cheapjack novelty, often covertly as an expression of fear of the outsider.

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4. The Quest for Culture

The terms of the eighteenth-century debate on the status of Jews were notably altered by the decision of the French National Assembly in 1790 to grant full citizenship to all of France’s Jewish population; a dispensation which was effectively extended throughout western continental Europe by the Revolutionary Army during the Napoleonic Wars. This dramatic development abolished for the future (except for Rome, where the ghetto rattled on until 1870, and the Nazi interregnum), the quasi- feudal status of Jewish communities in Western Europe, despite attempts after 1815 by some restored regimes to reverse or inhibit it.

The Jews were now, at least in theory, to be equal to all other citizens, with a freedom of individual belief; in the striking words of Clermont-Tonnere to the Assembly, ‘We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation, and accord everything to Jews as individuals’.120 This statement marks an important conceptual watershed; on the one side Jews as a caste, on the other Jews as citizens.

From the politician’s standpoint the definition of Jewish religion as the individual’s confession of faith was an appropriate and convenient one. The theory provided justification for the claim that Jews could be regarded as just one more religious group amongst others.121

As it turned out, matters were not so simple. Many had expected that when the barriers to social equality had been removed, Judaism would wither away, as having no longer any need for self-imposed separatism of custom or practice, such as keeping kosher or marrying within the faith. Indeed in the hopes of some, Jewish beliefs would quickly vanish as being clearly incompatible with modern society. The persistence, to varying extents, of all or some of these aspects - the cultural, as well as the religious components of Jewish life - amongst different sections of the Jewish communities was to provoke a renaissance of old prejudices against Jews in new formats.

120 Speech of 23rd December 1789. See Lynn Hunt (1996) 86-88. 121 Katz (1998) 207.

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An early example of this was the application to the Jews of the concept of the ‘State within the State’, originally used to designate the Huguenots within France in the seventeenth century. It was Fichte who First effectively formulated the charge in its new guise in his 1793 reflections on the French Revolution:

A mighty state stretches across almost all the countries of Europe, hostile in intent and engaged in constant strife with every one else [...] This is Jewry.122

Fear of this potential division of loyalty led to the new freedoms of Jewry being soon challenged by himself, summoning a ‘Sanhedrin’ to establish Jewish relation to the State. Nonetheless, the standard had been set by the deliberations of the Revolutionary Assembly for a statutory formalization of civic inclusivity which Jews and their politically liberal allies sought firmly to establish across Europe - an aim which, by mid-century, despite widespread restoration of old regimes, had indeed been very largely achieved.

The consequences, both direct and indirect, of this theoretical civic equality, were to affect and be reflected in the progress of Jewish music and musicians in the first half of the nineteenth century, in Britain as well as in Continental Europe.

If France was the political godfather of Jewish emancipation, Germany was its cultural godfather. Given that German, or German-based Yiddish, was the lingua franca of Jewish communities in Germany, Netherlands, the Habsburg lands and the French Rhine provinces, German ideas could spread simply amongst the Jewish communities of north and central Europe. Already in the 1780s developments were in progress that would lead to the movement for synagogue and religious reform.

In 1783 Moses Mendelssohn had attempted to formulate a means by which traditional Judaism, as he understood it, and gentile European society could live side by side:

Let everyone be permitted to speak as he thinks, to invoke God after his own manner or that of his fathers, [..] as long as he does not disturb public felicity and acts honestly towards the civil laws.123

122 Katz (1980) 58-60. 123 M. Mendelssohn (1983) 139.

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Mendelssohn, however, could not have conceived of the notion of a person considered by himself (and/or others) as a Jew, but living outside the parameters of a traditional Jewish community and practices; nor had he foreseen the imminence of the day when the state might be a guarantor of religious freedoms in general, but might at the same time promote or endorse (both formally though its institutions, and informally through general public opinion) social or political attitudes inimical to Jewish traditions. These changes left Mendelssohn’s ideals superficially attractive, but in practice irrelevant; and the belief (amongst both Jews and gentiles of goodwill) that they could be simply applied in the more complex world of the nineteenth century contributed in fact to what Mendelssohn would have abhorred, the collapse of traditional German Judaism in favour of reform or conversion.

In both France and England, such a crisis was effectively side-stepped. A clearer confidence by their inhabitants in the nature of the State meant that discourse, in the press and in public debate, on the relationship of Jews and the State in the nineteenth century was far less evident or voluminous than in the politically fragmented Germany of the time, or the uneasy cohesion of the Habsburg Empire. And hence there was less incentive for the French and English to differentiate Jewish citizens from ‘natives’.

The new civic dispensation offered prospects that made it seem worthwhile, to many in the Jewish communities, to sacrifice part (or sometimes all) of their traditions in order to stake a stronger claim in the new civic society which was emerging. This sacrifice was to become reflected in the practices of the synagogue itself, hardly changed in essence for many centuries previously. Again, this pressure was felt most strongly in Germany. In France, where the separation between Church and State diminished the need to conform to national devotional protocols, new congregations outside the Rhineland (only sanctioned after the Revolution), could start with a ‘clean slate’ in organising themselves in a way compatible with their neighbours. In England the civic accommodation which had been achieved between Jew and Gentile meant that synagogue reform could be postponed until the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

But in Germany the Jewish elite, wealthy, liberal and cultured, regarded with distaste the chaotic state of local synagogue practice (compared with the organised services,

59 Jewry in Music II: Eppes Rores

choral singing with organ, and disciplined congregations to be found in churches). Such public manifestation of Judaism was in itself a threat to their new civic status.

If they were to be new Germans, yet were relieved of any obligation to disavow their religion, they did not wish to compare unfavourably with their Gentile neighbours at prayer any more than in the splendour of their homes or their attachment to culture. It was in the home of one of the richest Jews in Berlin, Jakob Herz Beer, that one of the first congregations of the new kind was established in 1815. Such initiatives were widely replicated.

The results are neatly summed up by a visit to a reformed synagogue in the 1830s of the convert to Catholicism, August Lewald, in his Memoirs o f a Banker :

What I found here could be called great progress: I heard an illuminating talk, in pure German, and listened to lovely music from voices and instruments. What a difference between this impression and that confusing, deafening noise of my childhood, the impression made upon me by the unintelligible humming of the Jewish service [...] The decorous congregation, in the most attractive holiday clothing, the fine tone, which was to be found throughout, contributed to raising the effect of the entire service immeasurably.

But there was a catch:

Only the religiosity was missing! [...] Your old Jehova understood you for centuries and was not tired hearing you when you prayed to him. But no matter how powerful German is, and how good it sounds in the modem ear, you should not have sacrificed the old language of the Lord.124

This no-man’s-land aspect of reformed Judaism, not quite German, not quite Jewish, was to continue to haunt it. The suggestive parallels which connect this ‘transitional Judaism’ with the Romantic movement in Germany are discussed in Appendix I.

The stimulus to the development of synagogue music initiated by the reform movement itself led to a counter-reformation of music in the more traditionally- minded congregations of Western Europe, led by gifted Jewish clergy who also had a

124 Cited (in translation) in Gilman (1986) 144.

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true understanding and appreciation of Western musical traditions, such as Sulzer (1804-1890) in Vienna, Lewandowski (1821-1894) in Berlin, and Naumbourg (1815- 1880) in Paris. By mid-century there was for the first time a very significant cultural difference between ‘orthodox’ Ashkenazic practice in Western and Eastern Europe, significantly characterized by music in the synagogue.

But contact with European music traditions came not only via the synagogue. Hardly a single account of Jews in the early nineteenth century can resist quoting Heine’s claim that his conversion from Judaism was his ‘entry-ticket to European culture’.125 But few of these accounts point out that that the evidence is very much against it being applicable to European Jewry. (Heine himself would have repudiated this claim by the end of his troubled life; indeed by then he was complaining that European 1 ‘culture’ had swamped what was valuable of Jewish culture). “ In fact, conversion rates were, albeit with peaks and troughs, generally low during the first part of the century as a whole, even in Germany;127 the rising Jewish middle classes, both in reformed synagogues and in the modernised traditional congregations, took very strongly to identification with the cultural norms of their host societies without preliminary recourse to . Here they were undoubtedly assisted by the Bildung tradition of the eighteenth century German intelligentsia, an ethic which ‘merged redemption with education’128 in promoting a moral response to individual and social development. As the Bildung tradition absorbed, in Germany, the ideas of the French Revolution, it was able to shed much of its (Christian) religious background and to develop as a secular ethos:

When an economically mobile Jewish population that eagerly sought civil and political rights joined the ranks of the German bourgeoisie, bourgeois liberals urged Jews to develop their characters and intellects as a way of integrating into the middle class and the nation. Adapting enthusiastically,

125 Where referenced at all, this is quoted as from a letter to a friend, or an aphorism. The exact source seems elusive. 126 See e.g. Gilman (1986) 181-2. 127 In the first half of the century, the annual rate of conversions in Berlin was about I9r of the Jewish community. The rate of conversions sharply declined towards mid-century, rising again only during the 1870s and 1880s. See Honigmann (1989) 5-8. 128 Kaplan (1997) 124.

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Jews were “emancipated simultaneously into the age of Bildung and middle class respectability.”129

Perhaps of course German Jews also shared the attitude recorded by an anonymous writer of 1804:

What would I gain by [conversion]? I would not lose the name of Jew, but would be called X, the baptised Jew.130

A recent study has considered the attachment of Jewish families to artworks, in the context of claims for property looted by the Nazi regime in Germany, as an aspect of Jewish culture;131 and the adoption of high culture in general by emancipated European Jewry may be thought of appropriately as a replacement for the traditions set aside. In his introduction to the collection of essays on diaspora ethnology of which he is a joint editor, Thomas Turino quotes the characteristics of members of a generic diaspora, as conceived by William Safran:

■ They, or their ancestors, have been dispersed from a specific original ‘centre’ to one or more ‘peripheral’ or foreign regions

■ They retain a collective memory, vision or myth about their original homeland [...]

■ They believe they are not - and perhaps cannot be - accepted by their host society and therefore feel partly alienated and isolated from it

■ They regard the ancestral homeland as their true, ideal home [...] to which they or their descendants would (or should) eventually return - when conditions are appropriate

■ They believe they should, collectively, be committed to the maintenance or restoration of their original homeland

1:9 Ibid. The quote is from George Mosse . 130 Cited in Katz (1998) 123. See III.5.7 (Zelter on A. B. Marx) for a precise instance. 131 Hatel (2004) 51-60.

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■ They continue to relate, personally or vicariously, to that homeland in one way or another. 132

The first two articles in this set of descriptors relate to a diaspora’s concept of its past; the others are more behavioural in character, pertaining to actions and mind sets. All these articles are deeply ingrained in almost every aspect of the traditional synagogue service, which is itself perceived by the orthodox as a representation or ‘icon’ of the service of the Temple. They were thus reinforced daily and regularly throughout Jewish communities that for centuries led parallel existences with the Gentile societies where they were located.

The new Jewry of early nineteenth-century Europe, however, typically sought in everyday life to assert its civic loyalty by overriding atavistic cultural loyalties, vigorously displacing their diasporic claims in favour of the claims of the new states where they had become citizens. Those who converted would even repudiate the first two, ‘historical’, articles; but convert and practising Jew alike sought to recompose the other articles such that they became quite the contrary of those of the traditional communities. In France, and in Germany, for these acculturated Jews, the state came to substitute for the ancestral homeland, and its culture (and particularly its music) for that of the historical synagogue.133 It was indeed the lack of success (as perceived by some) of this strategy in leading to acceptance, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, that contributed to the development of , in which the aspirational characteristics of a were again restated, in an non-religious, nationalistic, context.

It was thus not only the form of service in the synagogue that was changed in reform and counter-reformation, but the entire religious ethos retired from public display, as much as did its visual counterparts, the gabardine, peiyyot and sheitl.UA Those who still practised as Jews kept their yiddishkeit for home and the family. Early role models for this social acculturation included, amongst those who retained the Jewish

132 Turino and Lee (2004) 4. 133 Cf. Sorkin’s concept of * “flight of self’, in which the members of a minority group set out to find themselves and a community.’ Sorkin (1999) 178. 134 The persistence of the private mark of circumcision, even amongst ‘reformed’ Jews, shows, however, that Jewish self-identification continued (and continues) to run deep.

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faith, the Rothschilds and the Beers, and amongst those who renounced it, Mendelssohn and his family, and the salonniere Rahel Vamhagen. wrestled with his situation between the two alternatives for the whole of his adult life, and , more successfully, exploited his situation as ‘the blank page between the Old Testament and the New’. Their ‘third way’ is also frequently to be found amongst their contemporaries and successors.

The attitude to, and involvement in, culture of all of these, as collectors, connoisseurs, practitioners and commentators, was of a type that by the end of the century would be considered ‘typically Jewish’. If, just once in this thesis, we might look forward to the crisis of German Judaism in the twentieth century, let us consider the bizarre film Der Fiihrer schenkt den Juden eine Stadt (‘The Fiihrer gives the Jews a town’) (1944), in which the Nazi regime sought to convince the Red Cross and the outside world that the concentration camp of Theresienstadt was a benign holiday home. The centrepiece of this film is a scene in which Jews disport themselvesas the world had come to expect : a large audience (but in this case all wearing yellow stars), listening to a string orchestra. The music which they are hearing was written by a resident, Pavel Haas, and is conducted by another, Karel Ancerl. Within a few weeks of the film being completed, audience, orchestra and all (including those who made the film), had been transported to Auschwitz. Ancerl was one of the few survivors.133 This example serves to indicate that the story of Jewish involvement in European music and culture is more than an interesting byway, but rather can represent the mapping of a significant fault-line in the historical relationship of Jew and Gentile.

For the citizen Jews of Europe their new situation was marked by the abolition (immediate or gradual) in the public sphere of both externally imposed differences and those that were self-imposed: but more private cultural traditions, which there was no incentive to discard and which were ‘comfortable’ - yiddishkeit as opposed to publicly visible Judaism - were often retained, even by some of those who seem to have rejected Judaism most firmly. Abraham Mendelssohn, himself a ‘blank page’ between two notable volumes - he is reported as complaining ‘once I was the son of a famous father, now I am the father of a famous son’ - wrote a letter from London in

135 See Conway (2004c).

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August 1833 when he and Felix stayed with the Moscheles family, which contains a long paragraph in praise of Charlotte Moscheles as a model hostess, combining the virtues of the finest of both German and English womanhood. It concludes with the words ‘das judische Blut n'y gate rienV [the (her) Jewish blood is no handicap!]’.136 The very fact that Abraham uses French for the typically Jewish litotes at the end presents itself as a sort of double joke to conceal the Jewish from the German.

This example highlights another feature ofyiddishkeit , that there remained amongst converted and unconverted alike a tendency to move in the same circles. In a parallel with the commercial networks of Jewish merchants, musicians of Jewish origin, it will be found, would often be in each other’s company, and successful ones would be sought out by aspirants hoping for assistance.

One interesting, if indirect, association with music which could perhaps be identified both as a carry-over from Talmudic Jewish values and as an identification with Bildung, was a passion for manuscript collecting. The interest of the Itzigs and the Mendelssohns in the works of Sebastian Bach has already been mentioned. Very striking is the interest of Jewish music collectors in the manuscripts of Beethoven, universally regarded as the outstanding musician who was at once the climax of what became regarded as the ‘classic’ period of music and the fountainhead of the Romantic movement. No firmer identification with the greatness of European music could be conceived than paying homage to the Master by collecting his papers and personalia (not, anyway, until the similar craze for Wagner got under way, also with a large Jewish following, later in the century). After Beethoven’s death in 1827, a market in his manuscript scores, notebooks and conversation books was soon under way and initially items became quickly widely dispersed. (The youthful pianist and composer obtained a literal head start by taking a cutting of the composer’s hair from his death-bed).137

136 Hensel (1995) 398. 137 The lock of hair purloined by Hiller sold at auction at Sotheby’s on 1 December 1994 for £3,600, to a consortium led by Mr Ira F. Brilliant, and is now at the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies, San Jose State University, USA. Mr Brilliant is therefore a recent example in a distinguished line of Jewish collectors of musicalia. See .

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Patient searching and retention over the next few years by a dedicated few brought together some notable collections. Amongst the earliest were those of Moscheles and by Felix Mendelssohn. Moscheles, it appears, was at one stage even the owner of Beethoven’s Broadwood piano, which was eventually to belong to .138 But the most substantial collection was made by Heinrich Beer, elder brother of Meyerbeer, the basis of whose collection was probably the acquisition in 1834 of the manuscripts owned by the publisher Artaria in Vienna. It is also possible that it was Heinrich who gave Felix Mendelssohn the manuscript of the Seventh . Heinrich Beer is generally known to history only from the sarcastic comments of Heinrich Heine, who depicted him as a madman obsessed with collecting walking- sticks;139 the image has therefore persisted of him as a wealthy halfwit. It seems that no one has realised that Heine must, in this caricature, have been mocking Heinrich’s assiduous gathering of Beethoveniana. (There is, at any rate, no evidence of the walking-sticks save for Heine’s taunt). At Heinrich’s death in 1842, the collection passed to Meyerbeer, who in the end decided to sell it off to provide for Heinrich’s widow and family. The purchaser was Felix Mendelssohn’s brother Paul, and the collection was presented to the Berlin Royal Library in 1908 by Paul’s son Ernest. Other major Jewish Beethoven collectors have included Josef Fischof,140 the violinist Joseph Joachim (a protege of Felix Mendelssohn) and the Wittgenstein family (to which Joachim was related).141

Beethoven was also an important point of reference in the emerging split between ‘classical’ and ‘romantic’ in which Jews were to take - or to be allotted without their consultation - sides on the musical divides between order and revolution, canon and innovation.

The romantic interpretation of music provoked the invention of the category of ‘classical music’.

138 Sec Beghin (2000) 121. 139 In H eine’s Confessions: quoted and discussed in Prawer (1983) 617-619. 140 Fischof obtained one of Beethoven’s Conversation Books, used by visitors to converse with the deaf composer; although now lost, it was transcribed and is an important source for Beethoven biography. See Thayer (1967) xiv. 141 See Johnson (1985) for a history and inventory of Beethoven’s notebooks. For Meyerbeer’s handling of his brother’s collection see Johnson (1985) 37-8, and GMBT III 640-41, 757-58.

66 Jewry in Music II: Eppes Rores

The new compositional principle of the final third of the eighteenth century, the combination of several themes connected (at least in the hands of the masters) by thrilling modulatory crescendos, must have been exciting enough by itself to warrant the word ‘romantic’. That the term classic is used at the same time is due to the awareness that these were works of permanent worth [...] [which] some colleagues have turned into the canon.

[...] For the first time in history [there arose] the concept of music as art. Music is no longer the universal, heterogeneous public work that functioned either to elevate or to entertain; it had at last been recognised

1 4 as the product of individual inspiration and individual expression. “

These definitions and concepts, coming into common use in the decades either side of 1800, involved in a real sense politicization of music; setting the classic against the new, establishing the romantic artist as hero pushing forwards the frontier of his (for the musician was almost always male, of course) art. The very use of the word ‘classic’ was heavily value-laden, imbuing works that fell within the canon with the unimpeachable majesty and authority of the great art of antiquity (none of the actual music of that time, of course, having survived).

Conservative musicians, amongst whom, for influence in the concert hall and in musical education in both Germany and Britain, Mendelssohn was outstandingly prominent in the second quarter of the century, revered Beethoven as the peak of a classic German tradition, one which could not be transcended; the culmination of the canon. The post-romantic avant-garde of the time, however, - amongst whom Wagner and Berlioz may be cited - viewed Beethoven’s work as marking a decisive and revolutionary break with old traditions and the commencement of a new aesthetic

142 Lenneberg (1994) 615. 143 For Berlioz see e.g. Cairns (1999) 31 1-320. Wagner’s most powerful statement on this theme is in his late essay ‘Beethoven’ written for the composer’s centenary in 1870. ‘Young Beethoven, on the contrary, we see daring the world from the first with that defiant temper which kept him in almost savage independence his whole life through’ (Wagner (1995c) 83) is a typical characterization. It is consistent with that shown in the early fantasy A Pilgrimage to Beethoven of 1840 (Wagner (1994b) 21-45).

67 Jewry in Music II: Eppes Rores

But as musicians began to realise after the 1830s, they were now in competition with their dead colleagues for the ears of the increasing audiences. The establishment of a canon, and the convenient index it gave to the new music-appreciating classes as to what they would be ‘safe’ listening to, meant that the proportion of concert programming given to contemporary music began to fall sharply.144 Radical musicians, such as Wagner, could blame the ‘philistinism’ of their audiences for not being adequate to the art they were producing and justify themselves on the grounds that they were producing the art-work of the future; and indeed they could seek to change society, as Wagner did, with almost catastrophic results for himself, in in 1849, to one which could appreciate that art.

Certain factors will have inclined Jewish musicians to the classical faction rather than the romantic. The first generation of German-Jewish musicians were largely from the wealthy minority of industrial and banking families - like Felix Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer - or from the mercantile class immediately below these levels, and their outlook was conservative or liberal rather than radical, in consonance with the gentile classes they sought to emulate or blend into. The identification with bourgeois Bildung was in itself essentially conservative. In general Jewish (and gentile) musicians who had no independent wealth and lacked the fury of genius felt little compulsion to sacrifice a career meeting public demand - and hence the prospect of competent prosperity - for the abstract principles of an art of the future.

Perhaps also there was some culturally conservative inclination as well stemming from Jewish scholasticism, accepting canons and shunning innovation. Mendelssohn’s importance as a ‘classicist’, both in his own music and in his concert programming in , and the continuation of his conservative tastes in the Leipzig Conservatoire after his death by Moscheles, had significant impact on German musical culture and education throughout the nineteenth century. This conservatism was also to be a significant underlying element in Wagner’s critique of Jewry in music.

144 Weber (1975) is a pioneering study of the causes and effects of this process in the European capitals. See also Weber (2001) and Weber (2003).

68 Jewry in Music II: Eppes Rores

5. Words and Music - Da Ponte and Heine

The parallel emergence of the German romantic movement and German-Jewish social rapprochement, discussed in Appendix I to this dissertation, enabled, by the 1830s, Jews such as Heine and Boeme to turn powerfully to advantage, through their writing, the equivocalities that lay at the heart of both romanticism and their own origins. But in the immediately preceding period a remarkable man anticipated these parallels and thereby had a profound effect on the history of Western music and culture.

This was , bom Emanuele Conegliano in a Venetian ghetto in 1749 - then of course part of the Hapsburg dominions - and given the name of his sponsoring bishop on his baptism and conversion in 1763. Da Ponte’s celebrated Autobiography is, like the very life it purports to display, a sort of teasing game, a pre-Hoffmann tale. The casual reader would not know that the author acquired in childhood a formal Jewish education and a fluent knowledge of Hebrew which he was still able to display in his last exile in America in the 1800s.145 We are told that he marries in Trieste (although it is not explained how he is able to do so, having taken holy orders), but we are not told that his wife is the daughter of an English Jewish merchant.146 When he eventually seeks his fortune as Court Poet in Vienna, he finds a patron in Baron Wetzlar, who introduces him to Mozart. The Baron was a son of the banker Karl Abraham, who converted to Catholicism to enable his acceptance in Vienna and ennoblement.147

The ‘converso’ world in which da Ponte moved at important junctures of his life therefore offers a clear indication of one source - of specifically Jewish origin - of the originality of the three great libretti he prepared for Mozart, Figaro, Cosi fan Tutte and . Each of these offers a sublimely ironic - in the Romantic sense - treatment of their subjects in that, in a completely unprecedented way, they provoke reflections on their own audiences. Each of them uses the element of disguise, for da Ponte personally an essential tool of survival, but in these operas employed for the first time not merely as an accidental or improbable twist of the plot, but made

145 See da Ponte (2000) xvi. 146 Ibid. 194, n. 55 147 See III.4.1 below.

69 Jewry in Music II: Eppes Rores

integral to the motivations and intentions of the characters. The psychological integrity of da Ponte’s use of the devices of disguise and identity is evident when compared with the crudity of, for example, Calzabigi’s , Lafinta giardiniera, set by Mozart in 1774, where characters casually flee, disguise themselves, go mad and return to sanity for no discernible reasons. The excellence of da Ponte’s libretti is of course taken to an unmatchable peak by Mozart’s supreme genius and sensitivity.

Few moments in art can match, for example, the exquisite set of infinite mirrors in the Trio of the first act of Cost: thanks to da Ponte’s libretto, we have a group of spectators singing a farewell, two sincerely, one knowing the whole situation to be a ‘set-up’, to two lovers who are pretending to depart, intending to return (in disguise). We, the audience, know all this, and moreover we know they are all actors; but the music Mozart provides, in its melody, harmony and orchestration, is full of the most painful longing, and persuades us unanswerably that this apparently farcical moment covers a situation which will reveal itself (within our own emotions of course - because the stage events are not ‘real’) as desperately sad. Conjunctions like this - rich with the bitter-sweet ironies which have come to be taken as typical of the Jewish experience - still today unequalled in their artistic quality, rendered stone dead to the Romantic imagination and the old conventions, and set a benchmark for the Romantic aesthetic experience. 148

Something must also be said here about the contribution of Heine to the development of , although the topic deserves an entire thesis to itself. The early of Heine was immediately popular with composers and he is probably the most frequently set poet in history - about 600 of his lyrics are listed as having been set (many more than once, amounting to over 8,000 settings) on an internet index of lieder texts.149 These settings include many of Schumann’s greatest contributions to the lieder tradition (for example his 1840 cycle Dichterliebe), as well as works by both Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, and by Grieg, Liszt, Meyerbeer, Wolf,

148 Although the Romantics were to cultivate the da Ponte operas, it should be noted that Mozart himself had given a new impulse to opera seria in Idomeneo, and was to set M estastasio’s La Clemenza d iT ito in 1791. 149 See . A comparable figure for Goethe is of 421 lyrics (again many in multiple settings) - see < http://www.recmusic.org/lieder/pindexg.html>.

70 Jewry in Music II: Eppes Rores

Rubinstein, Wagner, Schubert and Brahms.150 They are the very essence of nineteenth century musical romanticism.

But Heine’s involvement with Romantic music goes very much further than that. Although he never wrote a note of music himself, he was a devotee of both music and musicians. His writings from Paris, both his reviews and his correspondence, and even his satirical poems, tell us much about the musical world of his time, underpinned by both his perspicacity and romantic irony. He knew many of the great musicians personally, including Meyerbeer (who was a cousin and a source of finance) and Wagner. He suggested libretti for , including Adam’s and an abortive which he wrote for London. Moreover, of the early works of Wagner, the operas Der Fliegende Hollander and Tannhauser both have clear debts to Heine’s treatments of these , and a case can also be made for in this respect.151

Like da Ponte, Heine’s artistry has, both explicitly and implicitly, roots in his Jewish origins, and indeed to his struggle to come to terms with them. Those of his writings that deal explicitly with Jews and Judaism - and there are many of them - evince a love-hate relationship certainly of epic proportions.152 But the same senses of the hopelessness of redemption and the inevitability of mortification, the radiant prospect of fulfilment and the simultaneous knowledge that it cannot be attained - the trade marks of romanticism - also inform his love poetry and indeed virtually every word he wrote. Whether those who set his words had a full understanding of the ironies they encompassed, and were able to reflect them appropriately even if they comprehended them, remains an issue for debate.153 But Heine’s Jewishness is a major element in his qualification as a Romantic, and the extent to which his work pervaded that of the Romantic musicians and their successors is a major, if covert, manifestation of Jewry in music.

150 In the twentieth century they have been set by, amongst others, composers as disparate as Henze, Ives, Rachmaninov and Lord Berners. 151 In, respectively, Heine’s works Memoiren von Heeren von Schnabelewopski (1834) and Elementargeister (1837). The latter also refers to the Nibelung legends. The word Gotterdammerung, (the title of the last opera of the Ring cycle), was coined by Heine in an 1823 poem (Rose (1992) 32). See also Borchmeyer (2003). 152 See Prawer (1983) for a very detailed exploration of this topic. 153 See e.g. Brauner (1981).

71 Jewry in Music llliln the Midst of Many People

III. In the Midst of Many People

‘And the remnant of Jacob shall be in the midst of many people’ - Micah, 5.7

72 Jewry in Music III. In the Midst of many People /1. Musical Europe

1. Musical Europe

Katz remarks that ‘the story of Jewish emancipation in any of the Western European countries could be told separately but not for each country in isolation’.154 The same may be said of the story of musical development in the same period, and this points to an important element common to both musical and Jewish history - that they stand in flexible relationships to local and political histories of the European states, because whilst subject to the consequences of these, they are also to some extent transcendent, standing above and apart from them.

Artists, like Jews, share a culture independent of geopolitical boundaries, and it could be said that like Jews, they shared a common language, whether of the representational or musical arts, which enabled them to on wherever they happened to be. For many centuries it had been traditional for leading practitioners of the non-literary arts to work or study at wherever the centres of those arts at that time happened to be located in Western Europe. Often they were attached to courts, and dynastic changes could lead to artistic changes; as when Charles V, becoming King of Spain in 1516, brought with him his Flemish musicians introducing the music of to the South. Without exaggerating the parallels overmuch, one can sense a way in which European culture was fertilised by travelling practitioners of the arts much as European economies were fertilised by trade. ‘Without the aids of broadcasting and international airlines, the musical world of the early Renaissance was an exceedingly cosmopolitan affair’,155 and as travel improved, musical Europe became a ‘state beyond the states’. Trends in the fashionable parts were eagerly imitated in others, the most notable success in musical globalization being of course Italian opera, which from its beginnings in around 1600 in northern Italian courts had become within two hundred years the choice entertainment throughout Western Europe.

154 Katz (1998) 3. 155 Robertson and Stevens (1963) 22.

73 Jewry in Music III. In the Midst of many People /1. Musical Europe

By the eighteenth century there were already well-established circuits for opera- singers and for musical prodigies, and, despite notable national differences and predilections, there was a recognisable pan-European musical culture, with, according to the cognoscenti, Italian opera at its apex. Reflecting social changes, this culture flourished in urban centres where now theatres were no longer only operated by, or dependent on, courts and the aristocracy, but could also be commercial ventures catering to a nascent middle class. The first public opera house opened in Venice as early as 1637. The towns visited by Mozart under his father’s management between 1762 and 1776 (that is, when he was between the ages of 6 and 20) are a good indication of some of the major European musical ports of call at this period.156 In German-speaking countries, these included Vienna, , Mainz, Frankfurt, Koblenz (and the family’s home base of Salzburg); in Italy, , , , Rome, ; in France, Paris; in the Austrian Netherlands, ; in Holland, The Hague and Amsterdam: and in England, London. (There were inevitably in addition innumerable detours to visit and perform at aristocratic, ecclesiastic and royal establishments and country houses).

Although these were the major population centres of their era, they were very small in comparison to their present sizes. Even in 1800, the largest city in Western Europe, London, had yet to reach a population of one million. Paris and Naples (second and third largest) were around half its size, and the population of the fourth largest city, Vienna, was under 250,000. With the exception of London, Jews were forbidden to reside in these major cities, or had only doubtful status as residents, at least until the period of the Napoleonic Wars. The table below, compiled from a variety of sources,157 indicates estimated total and Jewish populations of some European centres during the period of this survey. The numbers of Jews, in particular, must be taken as little more than indicative: in most cases they are based on estimates by State or Jewish authorities, rather than census evidence. Some of them (e.g. 66 Jews in Leipzig in 1835) are certainly under-estimates, maybe of a high order.

156 I have extracted this list from Halliwell (1998) 48-50, 61-2, 77-8 and 96-8, and from the Mozart family correspondence in LOMF I xxi-xxiii. 157 Principally EJ and JE.

74 Jewry in Music III. In the Midst of many People /I. Musical Europe

1750 total 1750 Jews 1800 total 1800 Jews 1850 total 1850 Jews

London 676000 6000 861000 11000 2230000 40000 Paris 560000 400 547000 2600 1314000 3459 ? - but very Naples 324000 - 430000 <100 416000 few Vienna 169000 100-200 291000 1200 426000 c. 15000 Amsterdam Sephardim 3000 2500 Ashkenazim 18200 22700 total 219000 16800 201000 21200 225000 25200 204 houses in Frankfurt 9 35000 4300(1817) c. 60000 c. 5700 ghetto Berlin 113000 1945(1743) 172000 3373 (1812) 446000 11840

Leipzig >20000 10-20 30000 9 63000 66 (1835)

Table III.1.1 Population of some European urban centres, 1750-1850

This table also indicates very clearly those centres which were in decline or relatively static and those which prospered during this period. The growth of Jewish involvement in the music trades, not surprisingly, follows more or less the cycles of prosperity in the centres where they were able to establish themselves. It should be made clear, however, that this form of presentation should not be taken to imply that there were not musical developments in other European communities. As Adler notes,

The rise of art music in or around the synagogue in some European communities was far from being hampered by ghetto life. On the contrary, the segregation of the Jews in the ghetto of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries seems to have been a catalyzing factor in the penetration of art musical practices in the synagogue. [Documentation reveals] that there was considerable art-music activity in some European Jewish centres, especially in Sephardic communities. 1S8

Traces of some of these developments, especially in some of the Italian communities, will be found in the following narratives. The eventful career of Michele Bolaffi (1768-1842) gives an example of how involvement in such activities might lead to a career across Europe (and, in his case, back home again).

158 Adler (2002) 2.

75 Jewry in Music III. In the Midst of many People /1. Musical Europe

Bolaffi, who may have been bom in Livomo, first appears in Florence, where a celebrating the new synagogue in 1793 was composed by ‘the head of the musicians and players, the eminent Michael Bolaffi, son of holy sires’. He wrote an opera, , in 1802 (which was scheduled for a performance in Naples in 1829).159 In 1809 he is said to be found in England as ‘Musical Director to the Duke of Cambridge’, son of George III.160 In 1809 Bolaffi published in London a Sonnetta a voce solo con Piano Forte in morte del celebre Haydn, dedicated to the Duke as Governor-General of Hanover (whence he was at that time in fact in exile in England due to the course of the wars), in which the composer describes himself as ‘socio di diverse Accademie' ; the contains two other vocal works by him, but of uncertain date, one published in Paris, one in Italy.161 In the same year as his elegy for Haydn, there was published in Livomo his translation into Italian of Ibn Gabirol’s poem Keter Malkhoth\ in 1815 he toured Europe with the singer Angelica Catalani (1780-1849), and his connection with the Duke of Cambridge, who was re-instated as governor and Vice-Regent in Hanover from 1813 to 1837, must have been associated with Bolaffi’s appointment in Hanover as ‘ Konigliche Kappelmeister in 1815/1816. " The Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, which is the main source for this period of Bolaffi’s life, is not complimentary:

[Bolaffi] sings a sort of tenor, has method and skill, but alas no voice. Whether he is worst as a composer, an accompanist or as orchestral director, by the way, I leave to the acuteness of others to decide.163

Bolaffi then spent two years as maitre de chapelle at the court of Louis XVIII in Paris164, where he published a translation of Voltaire’s Henriade into Italian, and

159 EJ. Bolaffi. Michele ; Adler (1966) 127. 160 Roth (1952) 224. Roth speculates that the Duke may have taken up with Bolaffi in the course of British engagement in Italy during the Napoleonic Wars.However, as the Duke appears never to have visited Italy, and had been based in Hanover since 1795, it is more likely that Bolaffi may have come to his notice while the latter was visiting Hanover. There is no evidence that Bolaffi actually visited England - see Conway (2008). 161 Respectively, a cavatina for voice and harp Che cangi tempra (71816) and Sei canzonetti al celebre poeta Sgre. Francesco Gianni (7Naples, 71800) for voice, violin and continuo. 162 And hence Roth is wrong to suggest that ‘the Duke’s musical interests (at least in Bolaffi) were not sustained’ after 1809. Roth (1952) 225. 163 Cited in the original German in Adler (1966) 126. (*). 164 EJ, Bolaffi, Michele.

76 Jewry in Music III. In the Midst of many People /1. Musical Europe

wrote some settings of Christian texts. Following this he returned to Italy and once again became a pillar of the Jewish community. In 1825 the Or Torah school in Livomo performed poems ‘put to music by Professor Sig. M. Bolaffi, [...] with full orchestra’.165 In 1826 he wrote for the Livomo congregation a series of fourteen settings of Jewish prayers from the Sabbath liturgy, for voice with continuo bass and keyboard, but apparently for use in the synagogue, which are preserved in the Bimbaum Collection at the Hebrew Union College Library in Cincinatti.166

This rather baffling career, or rather palimpsest of a career, pieced together from disparate sources, with its switches of country and apparently of religious affiliation, and whose discontinuities seem almost to defy explanation, serves if nothing else to indicate the range of opportunities which opened to Jewish musicians in Western Europe in this period.

165 Roth (1952) 224 166 See Ronco (n.d.); Adler (1966) 127.

77 Jewry in Music III. In the Midst of many People / 2. The Netherlands

2. The Netherlands

2.1 Early Immigration

The immigration of Jews and marranos to Flanders at the end of the sixteenth century resulted in the first significant and ‘public’ Jewish community in north-west Europe since the period of mediaeval persecutions, and perhaps the first ever which approached some level of civic equality. Rabbi Uziel reported in 1616:

The inhabitants of [Amsterdam] mindful of the increase in population make laws and ordinances whereby the freedom of religion may be upheld. Each may follow his own belief, but may not openly show that he is of a different faith from the inhabitants of the city. 1 fill

Many of the wealthy Sephardic Jews maintained the interests in culture and the arts which they had cultivated in their country of origin. The community brought with it considerable musical skills. Rabbi Uziel himself, who died in 1622, is reported by a contemporary as ‘ famosa poeta, versado muzico e destro tangedor de harpa [a fine harpist]’.168 In 1624, most unusually, a musical performance took place in the Amsterdam synagogue during Shavuos, a cantata with instrumental interludes entitled

Dialogo des monies .169 Other rabbis are reported as harpists and singers. Daniel Levi de Barrios (c. 1625-1701) produced religious plays for the ‘Jewish Academy of Amsterdam’ which ‘were executed with musical accompaniment’. The music for these has not survived. The Academy contained a number of Jewish poets, including Jacob Castillo and Don Manuel del Belmonto. In a publication of 1672 Barrios compliments Castillo as ‘‘sublima en toccar la vihuela ’ (‘a sublime player of the vihuela’, a cross between guitar and lute) and Castillo returns the compliment commending Barrios’s performance on the lyre. These skills will have been essential because, as Seroussi points out, the new community, having been prevented from

167 Quoted in Schama (1997) 589. 168 MS of D. Franco Mendes ("Memorias [...] de Amsterdam'), quoted in Adler (1974), 11 169 Sendrey (1970) 386; Adler (1974) 15. Non-liturgical musical performances in the synagogue were forbidden by its statute after 1639.

78 Jewry in Music III. In the Midst of many P e o p le /2. The Netherlands

exercising, or forgotten, traditional liturgy would have had to build up liturgical practice almost from scratch.170

The active musical life of the synagogue community continued throughout the eighteenth century. The local composer Abraham Caceres wrote a number of works between about 1720 and 1740 for the synagogue service, including a cantata Le-el elim, which may have been influenced by Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater of 1736.171 Also, as elsewhere, music from outside ‘seeped in’: the manuscripts of the chazan Joseph Sarphati (active in Amsterdam 1743-1772) contain melodies from a number of operas; other manuscripts contain obvious imitations of Protestant church style in their settings of psalms.172

The community also commissioned a variety of music by the (gentile) Italian composer Cristiano Lidarti (1730 - after 1793). Some of these works (or at least parts of them) were still recently in use by the Amsterdam congregation.173 An oratorio T’shuat Yisrael al yedey Ester (‘The Salvation of Israel by Esther’), dating to around 1774, was discovered in London in 1997. It has a libretto by Rabbi Jacob Raphael Saraval of Mantua and Venice (c. 1707-1782) based on the book for Handel’s oratorio Esther, and is scored by Lidarti for a three-part choir, and orchestra of strings and woodwind, with five solo vocal roles.174 This indicates an enterprise of substantial scale, as well as evidencing awareness of the secular musical world.

Saraval himself is an interesting example of how interest in art music in the Italian communities did not die out with Salamone Rossi. In his travel book Viaggi a Olandia (‘Travels to Holland’) he tells of the amazing abilities of Mozart (whom he heard during the 1765/66 concert tour discussed below) on the , and he is recorded, in 1757, as having organised a Purimshpil for his yeshiva students in Mantua. The community records show this as ‘a kind of opera, based on a biblical

170 Seroussi (2001) 209-301 171 Adler (1974) 81. 172 Seroussi (2001) 307. 173 Adler (1974) 84-89. 174 Adler (2002) 5. The manuscript is now in the Cambridge University Library.

79 Jewry in Music III. In the Midst of many P e o p le /2. The Netherlands

story’ and note the provision that ‘no Gentiles be permitted to attend the performance, with the exception [...] of a tailor and a musician’.175

2.2 The Sephardi Magnates

None of the above shows any evidence of ‘crossover’ of Jewish musicians to the musical world outside the community. But by the beginning of the eighteenth century Jews had begun active participation in the musical life of Amsterdam. An early notice of this comes in the reminiscences of the composer, theorist and keyboard virtuoso Johann Mattheson (the same who was so dismissive of synagogue music as ‘a Hebrew gasconade’). Writing in the third person, he tells us of his concert tour of 1704:

In Holland he sought out the best organ works and heard the most talented players; and heard in Amsterdam various excellent concerts in the Dule [presumably a concert hall], at which were present the magnificent Portuguese Jews who bore themselves like kings and queens.176

Mattheson’s evident astonishment may reflect the fact that (due to the protocols noted by Rabbi Uziel) the Jews of Amsterdam were neither required nor accustomed, as in the rest of Europe, to adopt standards of dress and behaviour markedly different to those of their fellow-citizens.

The most splendid of the Jewish nabobs were evidently keen to make a mark as patrons of music, including the families of Pereira, Suasso and Texeira.177 Eminent amongst these was Ferdinand Lopes de Liz, who in his heyday in the 1730s not only supported performances of opera but sponsored concert recitals in his luxurious house in Korte Voorhout in The Hague.

In the period 1740-1742 de Liz hired as his master of music the French violin virtuoso Jean-Marie Leclair (1697-1764) whose contract required him to

l7